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From: ISSSSM@NUSVM.BITNET (Stephen Smoliar)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: MORE THOUGHTS ON THE TURING TEST AND NATURAL LANGUAGE
Message-ID: <9105290059.AA17541@lilac.berkeley.edu>
Date: 29 May 91 00:56:58 GMT
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X-Unparsable-Date: Wed, 29 May 91 08:58:44 SST

In article <1991May28.005456.15913@eng.umd.edu>, clin@eng.umd.edu (Charles
Chien-Hong Lin) writes:
>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).

You do not even have to think of slang.  Disagreements arise all the time in
the course of human dialog.  On most of these occasions, the problems are
quickly resolved through a process of negotiation.  Such negotiations occur
so frequently that we tend not to be aware that they are happening, but it
is very unlikely that we would be able to communicate without them.

One of the greatest fallacies in the study of natural language is that most of
the work can be done by isolating single sentences as objects of study.
However, in "real life" we do not accept a sentence as input, analyze it,
and furnish a reply sentence as output.  Real life is not so neatly structured.
If we wish to consider the impact of language on how we get on in the world
(which is to say how our use of language leads to phenomena which we are
willing to call "human intelligence"), we had better stop asking myopic
questions about the Turing computability of sentence recognition and start
thinking about the relationship between language and behavior instead!  (This
is not to say that we should all go back to Skinner's VERBAL BEHAVIOR, which
is probably a bit too simplistic for our current view of the world.  Rather,
it is a suggestion that it may be time to think about extrapolating on the
early results of Brooks by asking in what directions we shall need to go before
such robots can have language in their repertoire of tools.)

Stephen W. Smoliar
Institute of Systems Science
National University of Singapore
Heng Mui Keng Terrace, Kent Ridge
SINGAPORE  0511

BITNET:  ISSSSM@NUSVM