I came across this in the news a couple of days ago, and maybe some of you have seen it too: IMB's "Watson" computer and Jeopardy. Here's an older link dating from nytimes, June 16, 2010, giving more detail on the matter.
This interests me, especially since it involve a computer's participation in a natural language setting. By "natural language", I refer to the plain ol' language that you and I speak (and occasionally mangle) in everyday life. Of course, when dealing with a natural language like English, one also has to take into account many things when using, speaking, understanding, or studying one: ambiguity, vagueness, and creativity being the most obvious. It goes even deeper, yet: metaphor, connotation, irony - "play". But this isn't the first time a computer has participated in some game or other, the most obvious being chess. But with chess, it's a slightly different situation going on.
Chess is highly rule governed, and can be codified into a program that can successfully play the game. Chess is highly mathematical, which is why it fascinates many mathematicians. And when we're talking about mathematics, we can easily make the slide into computers and programming - which is highly formal and mathematical. Put two and two together, and you get Deep Blue, the chess playing computer - WHICH IS BOSS! To make it clearer, there's really no ambiguity involved in "2 + 2 = 4" or "If P then Q"; once you know the exact rules, "the rest follows". Computers have little problems with formal, artificial languages - mathematically precise rule governed languages. That's why they can "play" chess very well. But playing a game based on a natural language is different game.
Consider this: "The chef baked a cake in the oven." Nothing problematic there, huh? Consider this: "The chef hammered the cake into the oven." This latter one could be interpreted in various ways, given a context. Maybe she was angry and threw the cake in the oven; maybe she was literally using a hammer on a cake while both of them were inside the oven. In the first example, we have the usual occurrences of words associated with chefs: bake, cake, oven. In the second one, things get nutty. Call it an instance of a natural language at play, as it were. We don't really get that sort of stuff in an artificial language. Understanding either of those two (especially the second one) requires something else that a formal, artificial language lacks. It requires, in part, an informal logic.
Informal logic, or semi-formal logic, is the study of natural language arguments in all their glorious messiness ("I'll take "Amphiboly" for 1000, Alex!"). Just go to any forum and read an argument there. I would bet that it wouldn't take too long before some of them spun out of control because of the inherent untidiness of ordinary language. But there, I consider only arguments and disputes. Jeopardy isn't based on that sort of discourse, but instead uses the question/answer format - often very playfully and creatively worded. Still, it too, like the typical forum-dispute, is subject to the vicissitudes of verbalisms which vex us. We sometimes gotta bang our heads against whatever the heck something means. We have to think logically, of course, but informally so. The following example looks daunting, but it has a structure that's easily understood, given the rules of chess: "1.b3 e5 2.Bb2 Nc6 3.c4 Nf6 4.Nc3 d6 5.e4 Bg4 6.Be2 Bxe2." Just follows the rules, sir, and you'll eventually get somewhere specific. Now, there's this Jeopardy question: "Toured the Burj in this U.A.E. city. They say it's the tallest tower in the world; looked over the ledge and lost my lunch." Following a formal rule might not get you an answer, I think. Remembering trivia might get you somewhere, though. While Jeopardy has often been called exactly that - viz, trivial knowledge - it also uses to its advantage the creative aspect of language. As such, we gotta reason a tad differently when giving an answer to one of their questions. And it's here where I'm interested in questions concerning A.I., creativity, and language.
I wish I had the time to actually write more of this stuff out in detail (72 pages, anyone?) but I don't. I was more interested in letting ideas and thoughts drift from my mind to the screen, hence my own non-clarity and non-systematic thought. Sorry to let all of you tie up the details, but hey, that's language and messy thinking for you, haha.
Please excuse me while I go think of Chomsky, Turing, and Trebek.
