Hi guys,

This is very interesting discussion for me. And educating too. I have no professional knowledge in Computer sciences nor in Mathematics nor in Linguistics. I am just an ordinary man who struggles with learning of English. If you allow me to speak I will say(just my unprofessional opinion):

I don't know what Language is(natural/programming language). But I want to know what Simple sentence is(as a unit of Language).

The root of the problem(as I see it) are poor definitions of:

• simple sentence;

• preposition;

• conjunction;

• grammatical case;

• "Definition is ... ." and so on.

Also I find term AI somehow confusing for me. Isn't the goal building of a Conscious machine and not a machine with Artificial Consciousness?

Here is a thought: there isn't Language (by itself/per se).

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong. /H. L. Mencken/

I believe that for every right question there is an answer that is clear, simple and right. /if you can't find the right answer, you have probably been asking the wrong question/

So, if there isn't Language( by itself), what is Simple sentence then? If we can't find answer of what is Consciousness, we have probably been using wrong definitions and wrong set of initial/basic terms.

Thank you and have a nice day.

I had an interesting discussion at the recent Wolfram conference.

Someone use the example of a Quote that President Obama used on several occasions: "the last, full measure of devotion".

The first question was whether a natural language processing system should be able to tell that this quote is from Abraham Lincoln. Given access to the Gettysburg Address and enough time, it is probably within the realm of possibility for current systems, although it would probably have trouble with quotes that are not exact.

The second question was far more interesting. Should a natural language processing system know that the phrase was talking about death? Even if a native English speaker did not recognize the source of the quote (or that it was a quote in the first place), it is highly probably that the person would be able to infer that the phrase referred to death.

As far as I know, no "natural language programming environment" would have a clue.

As far as I know, no AI system has even a rudimentary grasp of metaphor. Far from a literary tool. metaphor is a key component of everyday speech. There is a vast literature on the role of metaphor in language, which I will not rehearse here.

Certainly, W|A doesn't have a clue about metaphor. Wolfram Language does not, either.

no. I have been using Mathematica for 29+ years, and I can state unequivocally that it is not a human level language.

If you consider a scale where 0 is machine-code and 1 is "star-trek" style programming, I'd guess we are at about a 0.1 level. Compared to assembly code (which I programmed in), Wolfram Language is a big advance, and even compared to c or Swift, it is more expressive, but is is by no means even close to human level language.

Each era has its own hype about "natural language programming", and certainly COBOL was more natural than Assembly or even FORTRAN, and so forth. This is understandable, of course, but it is still hype.

It is a constant source of frustration that W|A does not return what I expect in may cases. I have had many discussions about this issue with tech support since the service was implemented.

In addition, The W|A "universe" is a small subset of common discourse. You get far too many "I am not programmed to respond in that area" - type answers to too many queries, even what may be considered to be technical inquiries.

W|A does a fairly good job at providing the type of information that was in the old CRC handbooks or a decent almanac. You need patience to phrase the query in the form that W|A's parsers can handle.

However, this is by no means close to the type of natural language discourse.

I will know that there has been progress when you can ask W|A (probably its descendant) about the meaning of a phrase from Finnegan's Wake, and have it provide a meaningful answer on the fly (that is, not a canned response from a human authority).

For now, I am satisfied that it is a decent interface to the CRC tables and Information Please, and this is a major accomplishment. However, it does not cover the full range of natural language.