PirahN

Alexander Gross2 language at sprynet.com
Wed May 9 02:33:40 UTC 2007


Thanks for your reply, Timo.  I sometimes feel that posting on discussion
groups like FUNKNET is like placing one's head on a chopping block.  Though
i've received two positive responses privately, yours is the first to appear
on-line.  I've skimmed through your paper & even gone to your website to
find out more about your mental maps.  Give me a bit more time to read it
again, and i'll get back to you.

all the best!

alex

ps--if you haven't already read my thoughts about mapping language, you'll
find them on  my site at:

http://languag2.home.sprynet.com/f/evishop.htm.

----- Original Message -----
From: <timo.honkela at tkk.fi>
To: <funknet at mailman.rice.edu>; "Alexander Gross2" <language at sprynet.com>
Sent: Sunday, May 06, 2007 2:52 PM
Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] PirahN


> On Fri, 4 May 2007, Alexander Gross2 wrote:
>
> > 1) The growing perceived failure of most branches of Strong AI,
"mainstream
> > linguistics" among them through its close association with MT. Since
Chomsky
> > imagines that language is a "switchbox" that can readily leap from one
> > language to another, and since at least some researchers imagine
language is
> > nothing more than computer code, it should come as no surprise to anyone
> > that MT has always been an integral part of Strong AI, whose fate
appears
> > ever more dubious.
>
> Thank you for the interesting comments, points of view and links that
> you provided. The MT issue is discussed in depth in the following
> article: "Philosophical Aspects of Neural, Probabilistic and
> Fuzzy Modeling of Language Use and Translation". Proceedings of
> IJCNN'07, International Joint Conference on Neural Networks, in print.
>
> The article is available at
> http://www.cis.hut.fi/tho/honkela_translation_ijcnn07.pdf
>
> Comments are most welcome! (The conference is organized in
> August in Orlando with a special session on Philosophical Aspects
> of Neural Network Modeling.)
>
> Abstract:
>
> Serious efforts to develop computerized systems for natural language
> understanding and machine translation have taken place for more than
> half a century. Some successful systems that translate texts in
> limited domains such as weather forecasts have been implemented.
> However, the more general the domain or complex the style of the text
> the more difficult it is to reach high quality translation. The same
> applies to natural language understanding. All systems need to deal
> with problems like ambiguity, lack of semantic coverage and pragmatic
> insight. In this article, some philosophical questions that underlie
> the difficulty of natural language understanding and good quality
> translation are first studied. These two areas of dealing with
> languages are actually closely related. Namely, for instance Quine's
> notion of indeterminacy of translation have shown that the problem of
> translation does not only hold for translation between different
> languages but similar problems are encountered when communication
> between users of same language is considered. The term intralingual
> translation has been used e.g. by Roman Jakobson. Intralingual
> translation relates to translation between languages and to the
> problem of sameness of meaning. In this article, arguments and methods
> of considering translation and meaning within the framework of
> continuous-valued multidimensional representations, probability
> theory, fuzzy sets and neural adaptive systems are considered.
>
> Best regards,
> Timo
>
> --
> Timo Honkela, Chief Research Scientist, PhD, Docent
> Adaptive Informatics Research Center
> Laboratory of Computer and Information Science
> Helsinki University of Technology
> P.O.Box 5400, FI-02015 TKK
>
> timo.honkela at tkk.fi,  http://www.cis.hut.fi/tho/
>
>



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