One of the major obstacles to real AI is the belief that knowledge of a natural language is necessary for intelligence. A human-level intelligent system should be expected to have the ability to learn a natural language, but it is not necessary. It is better to start with a formal language, with unambiguous formal syntax, as the primary interface between human beings and AI systems. This type of language could be called a "para-natural formal language." It eliminates all of the syntactical ambiguity that makes competent use of a natural language so difficult to implement in an AI system.
Syntactic ambiguity isn't the problem. The reason computers don't understand English is nothing to do with syntax, it's because they don't understand the world.
It's easy to parse "The cat sat on the mat" into
<sentence>
<verb> sit </verb>
<subject> cat </subject>
<preposition> on </preposition>
<object> mat </object>
<tense> past </tense>
</sentence>
But the computer still doesn't understand the sentence, because it doesn't know what cats, mats and the act of sitting _are_. (The best test of such understanding is not language - it's having the computer draw an animation of the action.)
Such a language would also be a member of the class "fifth generation computer language."
It might form the basis of one, but the hard part would be designing and implementing the functionality, the knowledge, that would need to be shipped with the language to make it useful.
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