Shane, I agreed with the wording in your earlier post more ;)
It is true that learning Esperanto would be easier for an AI than learning English or Italian. However, I think that if you had an AI capable of mastering the syntax-semantics-pragmatics interface [the really hard part of language, as you point out], then learning the syntactic rules of any language would probably be a piece of cake for the AI... Once an AI understands the world and can communicate in rudimentary incorrect language, you can teach it correct grammar, and it will probably learn the rules faster than most humans... -- Ben -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Shane Legg Sent: Friday, December 27, 2002 7:48 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [agi] Language and AGI (was Re: Early Apps) > I suspect that Esperanto will not be much more difficult to tackle > than any current existing language, or at best a *tiny* bit easier. > The greatest difficulty of language is not grammar, or spelling, > punctuation, etc. To get an AGI to the point of using _any_ language > "naturally" on the level humans use it is the big challenge. It can > be ancient Greek or Latin with all its declensions and exceptions; the > difficulty lies in the use of language per se. In case my position isn't clear, I think that any language will be too difficult to start with and development should be focused on playing a wide range of simple games instead. However I have been really struck by the fact that Esperanto (and no doubt many other artificial languages) can be equal to a natural language in terms of the role they play and yet are something like ten times less complex than a real natural language in terms of language structure. I'm sure a reasonably powerful AGI would be able to infer the Esperanto rule for forming the plural of a noun (you add "j" to the end of the word) but I think it would struggle to work out how to do it in Italian (it's about six pages of rules in my Italian grammar book and than doesn't cover all the weird cases like when a word changes gender conditionally when forming a plural depending on the context). Sure, getting a computer to speak Esperanto would still be *really* hard, but having hundreds of pages of grammar rules that serve no real purpose other than to add a truck load of complexity to an already difficult problem just seems absurd. I guess people continue to do AI with languages like English because that is what is of practical use and where more money is likely to be. Shane ------- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?[EMAIL PROTECTED] ------- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?[EMAIL PROTECTED]
