Kirsti, We are in violent agreement.
I looked at the slides you provided. With as good as all of them, was mark 'wrong', wrong, and again wrong.
I have been doing R & D in AI for years, and the point I'm trying to make is that current AI research is *on the wrong track* . I presented an earlier version of that talk at a conference on "data mining" -- for which statistics is the major technology. What I was trying to say: Statistical methods are useful for certain kinds of applications, but they are limited to Secondness -- they cannot answer the question "Why?" I didn't say much about Peirce in those slides because most of the people in the audience had been brainwashed by Frege, Russell, Carnap, and Quine. Before you can explain the solution (Peirce), you have to show the areas where current technology (mostly based on nominalism) has failed. For examples of failures, see slides 3, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 23, 25.... of http://www.jfsowa.com/talks/nlu.pdf
flexible word order and inflections go together... Google translations between English and Finnish are worse than terrible.
That's what I expected. For modern languages with inflections, statistical methods are far worse than for languages based on word order. For classical Latin, Google produces "word hash" (slide 27). Interesting point: Translations from medieval Latin are not quite as bad -- partly because most speakers of Latin in the universities were native speakers of languages that had lost or were beginning to lose the inflections. Therefore, they spoke Latin in the same word order as they would in their native languages.
The digital world does not know its history very well. It should!
I certainly agree. But the major reason is that most AI researchers have not studied anything other than 20th century analytic philosophy. The blind have been leading the blind.
I have developed a method for a dialogue between a six-to-eight weeks old infant and an adult.
That's important. Some people had thought that it would be possible for American infants to learn a language by watching TV. After months of watching Chinese TV, they learned nothing. But after a much shorter time with a Chinese nanny, they learned Chinese. I'd also like to mention the research by Laura-Ann Petitto, who studied bilingual infants who were raised by parents with all pairs of four different languages: English, French, American Sign Language (ASL), and Langue des Signes Québécoise (LSQ). For a summary of her results, see the slide below. She and her group have published many articles about bilingualism, child language, and related topics. See http://petitto.net/pubs/published/ John ____________________________________________________________________ From slide 20 of http://www.jfsowa.com/talks/goal2.pdf : SPOKEN AND SIGNED LANGUAGES The same neural mechanisms are used to produce and interpret spoken and signed languages. (Petitto 2005) Studies of bilingual infants of parents with different languages: ● All pairs of four languages: English, French, American Sign Language (ASL), and Langue des Signes Québécoise (LSQ). ● Monolingual and bilingual babies go through the same stages and at the same ages for both spoken and signed languages. ● Hearing babies born to profoundly deaf parents babble with their hands, but not vocally. ● Babies bilingual in a spoken and a signed language babble in both modalities – vocally and with their hands. ● And they express themselves with equal fluency in their spoken and signed language at every stage of development. Petitto’s conclusion: Any hypothesis about a Language Acquisition Device (LAD) must be independent of modality.
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