3 ms·

> People use natural language to build up contexts, with various details, which the brain then must infer structure from in order to 'execute' the idea being di

> People use natural language to build up contexts, with various details, which the brain then must infer structure from in order to 'execute' the idea being discussed. Most of that simplicity comes from the years of built up information and context you have. You can just say "want to go to the movies?" And be understood because that person knows of your dropped "do you" in "do you want", that "to the" very likely means "via motorized transport in either an independent or shared manner" and that "the movies" refers to a physical theatre, with a to-be determined showing. NLP is a huge field and even the big names in the industry (Google, for example) are far off from anything resembling basic communication, beyond preset responses/dialogue trees. The fact of the matter is, you're probably not getting anything resembling intelligent human communication, til we have AI. Something that can think for itself and create true context.

JoeAltmaier 11y ago
Context is king. "Kill the man with the knife!" Who? The guy holding a knife? How? With this knife I have right here? We can't say anything at all, unambiguously, without immense context.
- abstractwhiz 11y ago
  This reminds me of old style text adventures, that frequently have to deal with this kind of ambiguity, and only manage it to a limited degree. For example: > kill the man Which man? > the one with the knife I don't see that here. > kill the man with the knife You don't have the knife. and so on...
takno 11y ago
The amount of context required here is crazy. There is communication context (am I saying that to somebody in the room, in the neighbourhood, or somebody I am going to visit next week in a different town), as well as knowledge of locality (there are 4 cinemas within easy walking distance of me, so motorised transport won't figure high on my list), and of historic relations (do we actually usually go to different showings and compare notes afterwards, will we share a movie and then head home, is there a bar next door to the cinema we usually end up in, do we usually turn up at the cinema find nothing worth watching and go bowling instead). For the minute I think NLP systems are best off politely declining and staying home to troll Twitter
nlpexprt 11y ago
> preset responses/dialogue trees What you refer to as preset is not strictly hand written, is it?
- deaddodo 11y ago
  No. It's something like. ambigious phrase or phrase token -> multiple possibilities the parser can handle -> multiple possibilities from the requester -> repeat until you've dialed down to a single possibility. It's a big part of what the Machine Learning guys and the NLP guys are doing. But, as mentioned, there's very little context for a computer to work with...so everything is very specific. "google, find me movie theatres in the area" vs "i wonder what movies are around. do you have any ideas google?".

JoeAltmaier 11y ago

Context is king. "Kill the man with the knife!" Who? The guy holding a knife? How? With this knife I have right here? We can't say anything at all, unambiguously, without immense context.

abstractwhiz 11y ago
This reminds me of old style text adventures, that frequently have to deal with this kind of ambiguity, and only manage it to a limited degree. For example: > kill the man Which man? > the one with the knife I don't see that here. > kill the man with the knife You don't have the knife. and so on...

takno 11y ago

The amount of context required here is crazy. There is communication context (am I saying that to somebody in the room, in the neighbourhood, or somebody I am going to visit next week in a different town), as well as knowledge of locality (there are 4 cinemas within easy walking distance of me, so motorised transport won't figure high on my list), and of historic relations (do we actually usually go to different showings and compare notes afterwards, will we share a movie and then head home, is there a bar next door to the cinema we usually end up in, do we usually turn up at the cinema find nothing worth watching and go bowling instead). For the minute I think NLP systems are best off politely declining and staying home to troll Twitter

nlpexprt 11y ago

> preset responses/dialogue trees What you refer to as preset is not strictly hand written, is it?

deaddodo 11y ago
No. It's something like. ambigious phrase or phrase token -> multiple possibilities the parser can handle -> multiple possibilities from the requester -> repeat until you've dialed down to a single possibility. It's a big part of what the Machine Learning guys and the NLP guys are doing. But, as mentioned, there's very little context for a computer to work with...so everything is very specific. "google, find me movie theatres in the area" vs "i wonder what movies are around. do you have any ideas google?".