This article on today’s MIT front page sketches an argument that I’ve been thinking about for a while, ever since the IBM Watson Jeopardy contest — that natural language processing is hopeless to the extent that there is additional context (side information) not visible to the machine.

Many prominent linguists … have argued that language is … poorly designed for communication [and] … point to the existence of ambiguity: In a system optimized for conveying information…, they argue, each word would have just one meaning. … Now, a group of MIT cognitive scientists has turned this idea on its head … [T]hey claim that ambiguity actually makes language more efficient, by allowing for the reuse of short, efficient sounds that listeners can easily disambiguate with the help of context.

Although this is just talking about homophonic ambiguity at the word level, the same applies to all levels of language, including full messages whose decoding requires potentially deep context.
(Read the article)

Comments(0)