Human and Machine Understanding Of Natural Language Character Strings

DOI

10.2991/agi.2009.27How to use a DOI?

Abstract

There is a great deal of variability in the way in which different language users understand a given natural language (NL) character string. This variability probably arises because of some combination of differences in language users' perceptions of its context-of-use (pragmatics), identity and mode of organization of its meaning bearing parts (syntax), and in the meanings assigned to those parts (semantics). This paper proposes a formalization of the syntax and semantics of NL character strings within a logical framework which is sufficiently flexible to represent the full breadth of possible ways of understanding NL character strings as influenced by different contexts-of use, beyond what can be represented in currently used predicate-logic-based frameworks. While the question of how language users understand NL character strings is ultimately a question in the psychology of language, it appears to us that, for the purposes of AGI, that question needs to be addressed within a logical framework which explicitly identifies the syntactic and semantic components that comprise that understanding, and which account ­ in formal terms ­ for differences in that understanding. Such a logical framework would provide a formal basis not only on which to address further psychological issues regarding human language understanding, but also for coherently imparting such understanding to machines.

Copyright

© 2009, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

Download article (PDF)

TY  - CONF
AU  - Peter G. Tripodes
PY  - 2009/06
DA  - 2009/06
TI  - Human and Machine Understanding Of Natural Language Character Strings
BT  - Proceedings of the 2nd Conference on Artificial General Intelligence (2009)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 120
EP  - 125
SN  - 1951-6851
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/agi.2009.27
DO  - 10.2991/agi.2009.27
ID  - Tripodes2009/06
ER  -