4 ms·

It’s interesting to think how fundamentally impossible it is to parse a sentence without a background corpus of knowledge about the world: > I dropped the hamm

• dariusj18 6y ago
  Also, the basis of a lot of humor is when the opposite of what you expect is what is intended.
  • praptak 6y ago
    "When I take the shoe out of the fire, I’ll lay it on the anvil. When I nod my head, you hit it with the hammer." comes to mind
  • twic 6y ago
    Samuel Delany thought this was part of science fiction too [0]: > There's often a literal side to SF language. There are many strings of words that can appear both in an SF text and in an ordinary text of naturalistic fiction. But when they appear in a naturalistic text we interpret them one way, and when they appear in an SF text we interpret them another. Let me illustrate this by some examples I've used many times before. The phrase "her world exploded" in a naturalistic text will be a metaphor for a female character's emotional state; but in an SF text, if you had the same words— "her world exploded"—you'd have to maintain the possibility that they meant: a planet belonging to a woman blew up. Similarly the phrase, "he turned on his left side." In a naturalistic text, it would most probably refer to a man's insomniac tossings. But in an SF text the phrase might easily mean a male reached down and flipped the switch activating his sinestral flank. Or even that he attacked his left side. Often what happens with specifically S F language is that the most literal meaning is valorized. [0] https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/interviews/delany52interview.htm https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/interviews/delany52interview.htm
• schoen 6y ago
  As you may know, the AI test based on these ambiguities is called the Winograd Schema Challenge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winograd_Schema_Challenge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winograd_Schema_Challenge
  • eindiran 6y ago
    There is also the GLUE benchmark, which includes ambiguity handling but also includes other NLU tasks: https://gluebenchmark.com/ https://gluebenchmark.com/
• baddox 6y ago
  And I wonder how you parse, let's say, "I dropped the pencil on the table and it smashed."
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • paranoidrobot 6y ago
    Interesting, but I think that it's unlikely someone would say that an ordinary wooden pencil was smashed, short of some more catastrophic action. A pencil might have broken, but not smashed. "We fired the pencil at a brick wall and it smashed" ... okay, it's probably the pencil that smashed. Perhaps a mechanical pencil, but again, that seems odd and unlikely. All of this requires a whole lot of knowledge about the world: - Pencils are generally made from wood, wood is a material that's more likely to deform or break rather than shatter - Tables can have tops that are made from materials that are more likely to shatter than deform/absorb the shock.
  • throwaway743 6y ago
    Random, but this made me think of the Big Daddy Kane line, "When my pen hits the paper, ahh shit".
  • roenxi 6y ago
    In that context smashed probably takes on a different meaning as a sound, and the sentence semantics are equivalent to "the pen clattered loudly on the table". Similar to how the word would work if someone talked about "the smash of cymbals". It would be an awkward sentence though.
  • naniwaduni 6y ago
    You reject it as semantically implausible.
    • paganel 6y ago
      Not necessarily, in this case I didn't reject the phrase "I dropped the pencil on the table and it smashed." as semantically implausible because of its context (it was used close to similar-looking phrases). Of course that it doesn't inform us anything about any "pencil" nor "table", but it does inform us about the limits (or non-limits) of AI.
• michaelcampbell 6y ago
  When I was in undergrad I was helping out a PhD student in computer science, working on how to parse English. One of his test cases was, "I saw the man on the hill with a telescope." for which there is of course no one possible meaning. I was told years later the company he worked for at the time (this was the mid 1980's) was the CIA (and to my memory, he only ever told me "his company" and never named it while we were working together). I don't know if or how any of my "help" made it into the US gov't, but I think about it sometimes.
• bsanr2 6y ago
  I recently learned that a number of African cultures used "memory devices" in order to assist in the recall of oral histories. Essentially, positions of beads on an intricately-carved board indicated to the practitioner what to speak next, out of a massive corpus of knowledge. Looking at the amount of background knowledge necessary to make Eurasian written documents intelligible, though, I begin to wonder if the common notion that SoS Africa had no written language before colonialism is inaccurate. In both cases, you have esoteric data recording methodologies that can't be deciphered without essentially already knowing what's being communicated, albeit not structured as presented. Makes you wonder how many other ways of recording history that we, raised in a Eurasian tradition of transcribed alphabets/syllabaries encoding lexical thought, completely overlook because we simply have no concept of recording and conveying thoughts another way.