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Language will be difficult for quite some time due to its links with culture and the fact that it is always evolving and cross polinating between languages. I

Language will be difficult for quite some time due to its links with culture and the fact that it is always evolving and cross polinating between languages. I don't believe there's any way to solve that without an AI that can actually learn and drive it's own understanding by observing and interacting with its environment both physically and through mimicry.

neilc 18y ago
Why would an AI need to interact with its environment in order to understand language? ISTM that deriving cultural information and understanding language change can both be found by simply observing its environment, and looking at the right corpus (e.g. the Internet).
byrneseyeview 18y ago
"Language will be difficult for quite some time due to its links with culture and the fact that it is always evolving and cross polinating between languages." How much trouble do you have understanding things written in English 100 years ago? 400? 800? Older works require footnotes, but they don't introduce new verbal concepts -- you can footnote Chaucer in modern English, and I suspect that a Chaucer scholar would be able to describe modern concepts by building on old ideas -- there isn't a discontinuity where you have some concept that simply cannot be linked to the words Chaucer would have used. So the problem is not that language changes too fast.
- aswanson 18y ago
  I think what he is saying is that the generation and extraction of concepts requires context that language may or may not provide. If you think about the approach of AI with language, it is almost the opposite of how humans learn: presentation of grammatics/language first and the extraction of concepts from this, whereas humans learn basic concepts of reality before speaking, and language is a partial representation of what they know.
  - byrneseyeview 18y ago
    That's true, but it's not at all what he said. He argued that language is a hard problem because it's linked with culture, and always changing. I think this is incorrect, because it doesn't stop humans from picking up second languages or from understanding older texts in their native languages. The hard part is whatever loop humans have that translates sentences into concepts -- not the loop that uses one sentence-concept chunk to link a new sentence to a new concept. That's in the library, not the interpreter.
    - aswanson 18y ago
      That's true, but it's not at all what he said What he implied from culture, I took to mean a polymorphic mapping of "sentences" or "units of communication" in a given understood context that can be learned only through experience. it doesn't stop humans from picking up second languages or from understanding older texts in their native languages It doesn't stop them, but it is far from trivial to learn a new language or to even resolve syntactic,lexical, or sematic ambiguity without context, even in a native speakers language: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambiguity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambiguity. The ill-posed nature of this mapping is not static, and for people not speaking their native language or young children this becomes the basis for some forms of comedy. As far as I know we have no generic grammar that can generate the rules for all languages; there is no universal "interpreter", and it is not certain that "concept" can be decoupled from "phrase" or "sentence" without context, so I don't think your separation of "library" and "interpreter" holds.
      - angstrom 18y ago
        That is in fact much closer to what I was thinking. The cultural context is important when it comes to understanding the less formal common grammar we humans tend to use more frequently and which is littered throughout the Internet. We can understand 400, 800, etc year old text, but one of the first things you'll notice is the language has terminology and informal phrases that may die off, live on, or evolve over the years. Toss in ambiguity, metaphores, double entendres, etc and it's not as simple. Perfect example would be Shakespeare. His style is rife with creative linguistic twists.

neilc 18y ago

Why would an AI need to interact with its environment in order to understand language? ISTM that deriving cultural information and understanding language change can both be found by simply observing its environment, and looking at the right corpus (e.g. the Internet).

byrneseyeview 18y ago

"Language will be difficult for quite some time due to its links with culture and the fact that it is always evolving and cross polinating between languages." How much trouble do you have understanding things written in English 100 years ago? 400? 800? Older works require footnotes, but they don't introduce new verbal concepts -- you can footnote Chaucer in modern English, and I suspect that a Chaucer scholar would be able to describe modern concepts by building on old ideas -- there isn't a discontinuity where you have some concept that simply cannot be linked to the words Chaucer would have used. So the problem is not that language changes too fast.

aswanson 18y ago
I think what he is saying is that the generation and extraction of concepts requires context that language may or may not provide. If you think about the approach of AI with language, it is almost the opposite of how humans learn: presentation of grammatics/language first and the extraction of concepts from this, whereas humans learn basic concepts of reality before speaking, and language is a partial representation of what they know.
- byrneseyeview 18y ago
  That's true, but it's not at all what he said. He argued that language is a hard problem because it's linked with culture, and always changing. I think this is incorrect, because it doesn't stop humans from picking up second languages or from understanding older texts in their native languages. The hard part is whatever loop humans have that translates sentences into concepts -- not the loop that uses one sentence-concept chunk to link a new sentence to a new concept. That's in the library, not the interpreter.
  - aswanson 18y ago
    That's true, but it's not at all what he said What he implied from culture, I took to mean a polymorphic mapping of "sentences" or "units of communication" in a given understood context that can be learned only through experience. it doesn't stop humans from picking up second languages or from understanding older texts in their native languages It doesn't stop them, but it is far from trivial to learn a new language or to even resolve syntactic,lexical, or sematic ambiguity without context, even in a native speakers language: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambiguity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambiguity. The ill-posed nature of this mapping is not static, and for people not speaking their native language or young children this becomes the basis for some forms of comedy. As far as I know we have no generic grammar that can generate the rules for all languages; there is no universal "interpreter", and it is not certain that "concept" can be decoupled from "phrase" or "sentence" without context, so I don't think your separation of "library" and "interpreter" holds.
    - angstrom 18y ago
      That is in fact much closer to what I was thinking. The cultural context is important when it comes to understanding the less formal common grammar we humans tend to use more frequently and which is littered throughout the Internet. We can understand 400, 800, etc year old text, but one of the first things you'll notice is the language has terminology and informal phrases that may die off, live on, or evolve over the years. Toss in ambiguity, metaphores, double entendres, etc and it's not as simple. Perfect example would be Shakespeare. His style is rife with creative linguistic twists.