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From: clin@eng.umd.edu (Charles Chien-Hong Lin)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Turing Test: opinions on an idea
Message-ID: <1991May28.005456.15913@eng.umd.edu>
Date: 28 May 91 00:54:56 GMT
References: <91138.123053DOCTORJ@SLACVM.SLAC.STANFORD.EDU>
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Reply-To: clin@eng.umd.edu (Charles Chien-Hong Lin)
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In article <91138.123053DOCTORJ@SLACVM.SLAC.STANFORD.EDU>, DOCTORJ@SLACVM.SLAC.STANFORD.EDU (Jon J Thaler) writes:
> In article <1744@anaxagoras.ils.nwu.edu>, will@aristotle.ils.nwu.edu (William
> Fitzgerald) says:
> 
> >I'm reading a book called _The Vastness of Natural Languages_ by
> >Langendoen and Postal, in which they claim/prove that no
> >natural language is recursively enumerable.  Accepting
> >this as true, this means there is no Turing Machine which can
> >be built to recognize the sentences of a natural language.
> 
> It's interesting to turn this around and ask whether human intelligence
> can recognize (all of) the sentences of a natural language.

   Considering what constitutes sentences (or even sentence fragments)
a sentence varies from person to person, the task might not
be achievable (think of slang).

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