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> Even humans are only probably approximately correct. This is very true, more true than we realize. Notice how much more "could you repeat that?" we have with
by burnte 5y ago
> Even humans are only probably approximately correct.
This is very true, more true than we realize. Notice how much more "could you repeat that?" we have with masks on. It's not JUST the mild muffling of the speaker's voice, it's not seeing their lips move. We're all lip readers to a small degree, and it helps inform our decoding to see the lips. Fff and th sound similar but look very different.
Even without that, think if your life, ever said "Waht was that? Oh, right..." then reply. At first you missed part of what they said (for various reasons), but you were able to "interpolate" the missing part from the context, and most of the time you get it right.
Our communication modes are lossy, and our brains make up for that to a large degree. That's the hole in natural language decoding, figuring out the hinting needed for an engine, because we're not totally aware of how we do it ourselves.
- emodendroket 5y agoThat's a different problem, isn't it? That's more about transcription -- getting the speech into words -- than about what he's talking about, making sense of the words once you have them.
- drdeca 5y agoThe two tasks are interconnected. The reasoning flows both ways.
- h0l0cube 5y agoNoise and lack of specificity are completely different problems, and the article concerns itself with the latter
- jacobr1 5y agoA noisy word might easily be guessed in context. But likewise a semantically ambiguous word might also be guessed due to other factors like the tone of the speaker, facial expressions or more. I suspect the parent's point is that the disambiguation in both cases might be addressed with information encoded in the other. One can pattern match based on the context. I think some of the work in multimodal transformer models demonstrates this.
- h0l0cube 5y agoI think what you're saying is true, but I don't think this kind of ambiguity was really a feature of the examples in the article
- burnte 5y agoI was replying specifically to the line in the comment I quoted, not the article as a whole.
- emodendroket 5y agoA model of language could help with transcription, but having a perfect transcription doesn't mean you can make heads or tails of what you've got.
- zR0x 5y agoWe had to learn to collaborate before “language”. Perhaps thinking language is a key aspect of consciousness is wrong. Chomsky has said human languages themselves are just random sounds we’ve been polishing the meaning of. So yeah I have no doubt a machine can sort them correctly if we tell it to. They mean what we want and see in them. That’s hardly proving anything about consciousness. Just that a computer can sort and count syntax, and guess at meaning by frequency of relative placement. It’s acting on English data sets. Not human biology.
- emodendroket 5y agoTheoretically, if we had a perfect understanding of human mechanisms of language, we could reproduce it in code. Of course we don't.
- zR0x 5y agoI don’t understand how we don’t? I make sound snapping my fingers. Whistling. Why is it so hard to accept mirror neurons fired when early humans heard birds and animals, each other’s grunts and over time we refined it? Everyone has some capacity to refine and strengthen muscle. Why do we need some abstract meta-construct to explain where language comes from? It comes from us. Fleshy meat bags that mutate state over a short period then die. Chomsky diagrams, conceptual organs and the like are useful for “being on the same page” in a particular context, but there’s no reason to believe language is a requirement for consciousness except our own propensity for romanticizing our existing.
- emodendroket 5y agoI'm not talking about "where language comes from." I'm talking about a mechanical understanding of how humans produce and understand language. Chomsky's idea goes deeper than "just random sounds," given his theory of universal grammar.
- zR0x 5y agoReligion shows we can create very detailed belief in ornate ideas that are scientifically nonsensical. It’s possible the concepts linguists seek to develop are similarly self reinforcing feedback loops that are meaningless to science. There’s been an explosion in biological science since Chomsky became prominent. He even admits his work is abstract and to serve his ends. We may be putting more into his ideas due to his fame and infamy than we should. Trial and error, social constraints on sounds and the mechanics of biology can explain it elegantly. What do the ornate theories and ephemeral organs provide except to satisfy “linguists” biological agency to create and imagine? Linguistics came about in a much less scientifically aware era in human history. My money is on it going the way of religion; an abstraction that’s so orthogonal to advancing science we leave it behind.