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Re: Fw: Intro to natural language processing



Party of Citizens wrote:
> 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.

I don't think a few million people would be the right venue for
training a robot; its too much like the old saw about an army of
monkeys banging at a typewriter until they get Shakespeare.  There
is no value IMHO to gobs of experience without some very well
thought out methods for aggregating that experience into well
structured forms.


> 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?

Yes.  The Turing machine is a very simple concept that could have
been implemented even using slave power back in Babylonian days.

Rich