In this paper we apply our understanding of the radical enactivist agenda to the classic AI-hard problem of Natural Language Understanding. When Turing devised his famous test the assumption was that a computer could use language and the challenge would be to mimic human intelligence. It turned out playing chess and formal logic were easy compared to understanding what people say. The techniques of good old-fashioned AI (GOFAI) assume symbolic representation is the core of reasoning and by that paradigm human communication consists of transferring representations from one mind to another. However, one finds that representations appear in another's mind, without appearing in the intermediary language. People communicate by mind reading it seems. Systems with speech interfaces such as Alexa and Siri are of course common, but they are limited. Rather than adding mind reading skills, we introduced a "cheat" that enabled our systems to fake it. The cheat is simple and only slightly interesting to computer scientists and not at all interesting to philosophers. However, reading about the enactivist idea that we "directly perceive" the intentions of others, our cheat took on a new light and in this paper look again at how natural language understanding might actually work between humans.
翻译:在本文中,我们把对激进的成文主义议程的理解应用到经典的AI-hard自然语言理解问题。当图灵设计出他的著名测试时,图灵的假设是,计算机可以使用语言,而挑战则是模仿人类智慧。事实证明,玩象棋和正式逻辑比较容易理解人们说的话。古老的AI(GOFAI)技术的象征性表现是推理的核心,而人类交流的范式则包括将表达方式从一个思想转移到另一个思想。然而,人们发现,表达方式出现在另一个思想中,而没有出现在中间语言中。人们通过思维进行交流,人们阅读它似乎是很常见的。有像Alexa和Siri这样的语言界面的系统当然是有限的,但是它们不是增加读心术的技巧,而是我们引入了一种“热液”使我们的系统能够伪造它。这种欺骗对计算机科学家来说很简单,而且只是略为有趣,对哲学家来说根本不有趣。然而,读一下我们“直接认识”他人意图的成文论思想,我们从一个新的视角上看,我们在本文中再次审视自然语言理解如何在人类之间实际上可能起作用。