Computational linguistics was the subfield of computer science that all the smart kids gravitated towards in the 80s and 90s (RMS came up in CSAIL during this time). While proving various results about formalisms and contrived grammars wasn't bringing in venture capital, most of the guys who would eventually bring linear algebra and stochastic methods to the field would at least have had to familiarize themselves with Chomsky's work.
i think your comment actually mostly makes sense, except the part about neural network guys needing to familiarize with Chomsky, which is not the case at all
Ergo, my initial claim that "modern approaches have zero overlap with Chomsky's deterministic methodology." Statistical token prediction began with the Dragon folks, the CMU guys, and Yorktown Heights, many of whom encountered Chomsky formalism as undergrads.
