Robotics Reference
In-Depth Information
it believes we have erred. But to do that requires only a knowledge of the
rules of good grammar and style, rules that are applied to phrases and
short sections of sentences rather than to long complex sentences. So is
the problem just one of scale?
The answer to this question is both “yes” and “no”. The “yes” is ex-
plained in the section “A Question of Scale” later in this chapter. To ex-
plain the “no” it is sufficient here to point to one of the major stumbling
blocks in NLP—ambiguity. Consider the following sentence, which may
at first sight appear to be completely unambiguous. 2
At last, a computer that understands you like your mother.
One of the possibilities of ambiguity in this sentence is something that I
would bet will not be considered by more than one reader in a thousand,
if that, namely,
At last, a computer that understands you like your
mucilaginous substance produced in vinegar during
fermentation by mould-fungus.
because the phrase “mucilaginous substance produced in vinegar during
fermentation by mould-fungus” is an alternative meaning of the word
“mother”. 3 Now it is obvious to you and me that the vinegar meaning is
not appropriate in the context of the first part of the sentence, but it is
not trivial for a computer program to be able to make this mental leap.
However, let us ignore this rather outlandish example, lest we be accused
of flippancy, and focus instead on three more conventional interpreta-
tions of what the computer in the advertisement is said to understand:
1. It understands you as well as your mother understands you.
2. It understands that you like your mother.
3. It understands you as well as it understands your mother.
Almost everyone reading the sentence would assume the first meaning,
for various reasons. Firstly, it is the type of thing that marketing people
say in their advertisements, so the fact that the sentence is being read
in an ad alerts the reader to a contextual mental framework, in which
2 The sentence is taken from a 1985 advertisement for a computer manufactured by McDonnell-
Douglas.
3 A definition taken from the Concise Oxford Dictionary .
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