Steve Richfield wrote:
"I have a headache. I missed my morning coffee."
From this, Dr. Eliza will see a present-tense headache, a present-tense
negated (presumed consumption) of coffee. A link definition would look
for a headache and no present-tense coffee, and past-tense coffee. What
it presently lacks is seeing that this also implies that the writer
usually drinks coffee in the morning, which is VERY important. Seeing no
(apparent) mention of usual coffee consumption, Dr. Eliza would then ask
something like "How much coffee do you usually drink on an average day?"
in the hopes that you would provide this (redundant) information to
improve its computation of probability.
Note here that the apparent primary meaning of this sentence - the
linking of a headache to missing morning coffee, was properly DISCARDED
because there was nothing useful that could be done with this opinion of
causality on the part of the user.
What I fail to see is how fully "understanding" the written/spoken word
is of any use to any computer program! What would you then do with that
understanding, since most of it will be beyond the ability of any
computer program to do anything useful and accurate with?
If you are saying that people have tried and failed to come up with good
methods for extracting the meaning of sentences such as "I have a
headache - I missed my morning coffee", then you would, of course be
correct.
But the whole point of doing research in Artificial General Intelligence
(as opposed to narrow-AI) is because we want to go beyond past
failures and reach a point where we can indeed build systems that can
fully understand sentences such as the coffee-headache one. Some of us
have explicitly made a priority of trying to understand how this kind of
understanding happens, and some even believe that they re making
progress on the problem.
In light of that, I cannot make any sense of your last paragraph, above.
If you mean this literally [!] then I am at a loss for words. Perhaps
you mean something else by it.
Richard Loosemore
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agi
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