Re: Fw: Intro to natural language processing
On Thu, 28 Oct 2004, Rich Cooper wrote:
> I found this message posted on comp.ai.nat-lang, and thought it
> might be one person's good overview of NLP results to date.
>
> Rich
>
>
> Rob Freeman wrote:
> > Andrew Wagner wrote:
> >
> > 1) Generativism (focus on language as system for producing strings)
> >
> > In practice almost all NLP to date has been Generative in flavour
> > (focus on language as system for producing strings).
clipped
We can all envisage the movie scenario in which people with different
languages meet and try to communicate with signs and single words, eg
western movies.
The widely used Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test is normed from ages 2-90
and it serves as a fair test of general intelligence. Imagine then a
humanoid robot like "Robosapien" (which sells in toy stores for ~$100) and
walks about your home doing this point-and-name routine. I think we would
be inclined to try and acculturate it by teaching it more extensive
strings beyond single words. We could go quite far in this direction,
especially if a few million people world-wide shared their "parenting"
experiences with Robosapien.
Z
PS-There is a link to Robosapien at
<http://www.geocities.com/ELECTRIC_ABACUS> and I'd appreciate feedback on
the general idea of this historical thesis as well, ie if the ancient
Chinese and Babylonians had invented simple circuit electricity as well as
bead-arithmetic machines, could they not have built a primitive computer?