Artificial Intelligence Essay Research Paper Artificial Intelligence — страница 7

subsequently, and only once, for the deep structure. However, as Chomsky showed much later on, semantics is part of syntax (the most important part), and thereby could not be dealt with post-syntactically. Not unsurprisingly, the only linguistic area where computers thus far have shown considerable ability is the area that humans find the most difficult, whereas the simplest human linguistic abilities remain elusive. Sentences known as recursive, or left or right-branching such as The monkey that the lion who had eaten the zebra wouldn’t eat ate the banana, have an infinite capacity for embeddings, allowing for the vastly superior memory of the computer to be more effective in parsing them. Understanding that Chomsky’s original breakthroughs (those of Syntactic Structures and

his 60’s work) had profound impact on Artificial Intelligence, the remainder of this paper will speculate on the potential impact of his minimalist program and the nature of what I will call the “syntactic mind.” The premise of the argument is presented by SUNY Professor William Rapaport in his essay “How to Pass a Turing Test: Syntactic Semantics, Natural Language Understanding, and First Person Cognition,” as a rebuttal to John Searle’s Chinese Room argument, which Rapaport describes as: “1) Computer programs are purely syntactic. 2) Cognition is semantic. 3) Syntax alone is not sufficient for semantics. 4) Therefore, no purely syntactic computer program can exhibit semantic cognition.” Rapaport responds by saying that syntax is sufficient for semantics, and if

you accept that, then you discover that a purely syntactic computer program can exhibit semantic cognition; in other words, if semantics can be incorporated into syntax, then the computer program can simulate the cognitive mind. This is a bold statement, so let’s see how it is derived from Chomsky’s work. Syntax is defined as the relations among a set of markers (Rapaport refrains from calling them symbols as “symbol” implies an inherent connection to an external object), and semantics is the relations between the system of markers and “other things,” (their meanings). His argument claims that if the set of markers is merged with the set of meanings, then the resulting set is a new set of markers, a sort of meta-syntax. The mechanism that the symbol-user (native

speaker) uses to understand the relation between the old and new markers is a syntactic one. The simplest way to put all this would be that semantics must be understood syntactically, and is therefore a form of syntax. The crux of the argument is that a word (for example tree) does not signify an actual external tree-object, but rather signifies the internal representation tree found in the mind Bibliography Moravec, Hans. (1988) Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence (Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press. Schank interviewed in: Kurzweil, Ray. (1987) “The Age of Intelligent Machines” [videorecording] / written and narrated by Ray Kurzweil. Waltham MA: Kurzweil Foundation; Cambridge MA : distributed by MIT Press Wooley (1992) pg. 106 Hogan, James P. (1997)

Mind Matters: Exploring the World of Artificial Intelligence. New York: Ballantine. Wooley, Benjamin. (1992) Virtual Worlds. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers. pg. 119 Turing, Alan M. (1950) “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Mind 59: 433-460 Ibid, pg. 203 Weizenbaum, Joseph. “ELIZA – A Computer Program for the Study of Natural Language Communication between Man and Machine.” Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery 9, no. 1 (January 1965): 36-45 Rapaport, William J. (1999) “How to Pass a Turing Test: Syntactic Semantics, Natural Language Understanding, and First Person Cognition.” Posted on Rapaport’s WWW page (http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/~rapaport/papers.html). He gives no bibliographical information, but presents the article as the

premise for a forthcoming book entitled “Understanding Understanding: Semantics, Computation, Cognition” Chomsky, Noam. (1982). Lectures on Government and Binding. Dordrecht: Foris. pg. 324 McGilvray, James. “Meanings are Syntactically Individuated and Found in the Head,” Mind and Language 13: 225-80. pg. 268 Ibid, pg. 227 Percy, Walker (1975) The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man is, How Queer Language is, and What One Has To Do With the Other. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Derrida, Jacques “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” The Strucuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972 pg. 247-8 Rapaport (1999)