Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
8
Case Study: Understanding Natural Language
This chapter turns attention to the sort of thinking required to make sense of expres-
sions in a natural language , that is, a language like English or Italian or Swahili that is
spoken naturally by people.
When it comes to tasks that require thinking, understanding language holds a
position of honor. One of the features that distinguishes humans from all other living
creatures is our ability to communicate using a system as rich as a natural language.
And to deal with this richness, we need to be able to think. A speaker can say words
like “the American President during the Civil War” and expect that under normal
circumstances a hearer will use what she knows to make a connection with Abraham
Lincoln. This need for thinking was displayed in a very simple but pure form in
chapter 1 in resolving the pronoun it in the trophy-suitcase sentences.
But the connection between thinking and language goes even deeper. It is not just
that thinking supports our ability to use language; the converse is also true: language
feeds our thinking. As emphasized throughout, thinking is using what we know, and
much of what we know is due to language. We find out about the world and the
people around us to a large extent not from personal experience but by being told :
people talk to us, we attend lectures, we listen to weather reports and to the dialogue
in movies, and we read: text messages, recipes, sport scores, mystery novels, and
so on. What we know and use in our thinking is a staggering amount of language-
mediated material. We pass on to our descendants much more of this information in
written form than all of the genetic information in our DNA. Given this dependence
on language, it is not surprising that thinking often feels like using a language, talking
to ourselves in some sort of inner voice.
This chapter only scratches the surface of the truly remarkable story of how lan-
guage can both depend on thinking and provide the raw material for it. Section 1
explains how language is usually studied in terms of syntax and semantics. Section 2
focuses on the noun phrases of English and how they can be used to refer to known
individuals and objects. Section 3 examines how these noun phrases can be put to
work in answering yes/no questions written in English and in adding to what is
known using English declarative sentences. (To do so, a new feature of Prolog is
 
 
Search WWH ::




Custom Search