Earle Jones wrote:

> "Computers cannot begin to handle language"?
> 
> You are woefully out of date.  There has been a lot of research over 
> the past 20 or 30 years on natural language understanding.  You 
> should read up.  Here are a few suggestions:
> 
> http://wesnerm.blogs.com/net_undocumented/2004/06/natural_languag.htm
> l
> 
> http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0805303340/104-7523691-
> 9994340?v=glance
> 
> http://mbi.dkfz-heidelberg.de/helios/doc/nlp/Baud93b.html

None of these references indicates that the problem of language 
understanding has been solved. If it had, there would not just be books 
about it, there would be machines that we can talk to just as we talk to 
each other; there are no such machines.

> These are three (of thousands) of sites that result when you Google 
> ["language understanding" computer]

Doesn't mean a thing.

> I have seen demonstrations of laboratory systems that first, 
> recognize spoken speech, then parse the sentences and extract 
> meaning.  The most successful are 'restricted domain' query systems. 
 > In other words, they are not claimed to work with all speech and all
 > language.

In other words, systems that attempt real-world understanding are 
failures. What works in a limited domain invariably fails when extended 
to the real world. That is the history of AI in a sentence. To say an AI 
system works only in a "restricted domain" is to say that it fails as an 
implemetation of human competency.

ie "Computers cannot begin to handle language" as the previous poster 
said. Many of the most important concepts in language derive from our 
consciousness and selfhood, our relations with each other and our 
pre-verbal understanding of the world. Machines do not have 
consciousness, selfhood, interpersonal relations or an a priori 
understanding of the world. That is why they cannot understand what we say.

> For example there is a medical data base for cardiology and 
> cardiologists.  If you ask, "How's the weather in Honolulu?" you are 
> not likely to be understood.

> 
> If what you are saying is that you can think up clever sentences 
> that will fool the system, you are right.
> 
> earle
> *
>
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