When Will My Computer Understand Me? 143
aarondubrow writes "For more than 50 years, linguists and computer scientists have tried to get computers to understand human language by programming semantics as software, with mixed results. Enabled by supercomputers at the Texas Advanced Computing Center, University of Texas researchers are using new methods to more accurately represent language so computers can interpret it. Recently, they were awarded a grant from DARPA to combine distributional representation of word meanings with Markov logic networks to better capture the human understanding of language."
Re:Voice is a crappy input mechanism (Score:5, Interesting)
But let's say, um, hypothetically and all, that a... ah... friend happened to have recordings of a few hundred million people's phone calls and needed a giant computer to be able to interpret them....
Backwards to the Future (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm struck by how much more accurate and responsive Dragon Naturally Speaking was in 1999 on my Pentium 2 than is Siri on my iPhone 5 and Apple's cloud servers today. Maybe it's a microphone problem, but in that case why was the $4.99 tiny microphone from Radioshack in 1999 better than the microphone in my iPhone 5 today?
Language does not exist in a vaccuum (Score:4, Interesting)
Each time I've researched NLP solutions, the full sensory experience is ultimately found to play a role in full context and meaning. This begins in a very tight locale, and expands outward, or hopping around locations/time as part of context.
Instead, when most solutions attempt to pick a "general corpus" of a language, they pick such a general version of the language that contextual associations are difficult to follow for any conversation. Even the most ubiquitous vocabulary, such as in national broadcast news, there are assumptions that point all the way back to simplistic models of our experiences via sight/hearing, taste/smell, touch/movement and planning/expectation. Even in our best attempts, nothing such as metaphor or allusion is followed well, and only the most robotic - formal - language understood. This interaction is certainly nothing "natural".
I don't believe NLP problems will be (as easily) solved until we begin to solve the "general stimulus" for input, storage, searching and recall across the senses that humans have - their true "natural" habitat that language is describing. So that when apple goes from "round" to "red" to "about 4in" to "computer" to "beatles" to "not yet in season here" to "sometimes bitter" to "my favorite of grandma's pies", etc - and onward, like potential quantum states until the rest of the conversation collapses most of them - we may be able to get a computer to really understand natural language. This isn't possible in just the manipulation of pieces of text and pointers.
When will it understand you? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I can answer that, Alex! (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, computationalism is long dead. Now, can we stop using the term AI? Keeping the term around serves only to further confuse the general public and decision-makers both public and private. I'd go as far as to say that the continued misuse of the term is precisely what has kept the cranks and con artists in business!
Re:Maybe.. (Score:4, Interesting)
I've watched the AI folk fart around with those things for over 25 years; they've nothing to show.
Even my preferred hobby of symbolic AI has gotten mostly nowhere in the last 30 years.
Let's just make certain animals smarter and call it a day. what could go wrong?