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Dil Kullanımı Dersi - Kasım 2018

Pragmatics and Semantics : Linguistics Problems

on the Development of Artificial Intelligence

Since the development of technology, Artificial Intelligence 1 has been one of the
biggest subjects of computer engineering studies and has a close relationship
between Linguistics. Since the late 1960's computer engineers and linguists are
working together for the goal of A.I. research, which is "to construct computer
programs which exhibit behaviour that we call 'intelligent behaviour' when we
observe it in human beings". Although there were been many improvements in A.I.
since the 1960s, the biggest challenges lie in the problem of Semantics2 and
Pragmatics3

1. History of the Relationship between Linguistics and A.I

The first connection between A.I and Linguistics started with the subject of Machine
Translation in the 1970s. Machine Translation is the computer understanding and
interpreting a given sentence. This was a precursor for the development with A.I. in
the computer engineering field.

Numerous tests were done to try out the given solutions. These were tests such as
asking questions to the computer via typing, speech recognition and translation
between two languages. The biggest obstacle that A.I. research faces that the
computer could only understand language as "units of meaning added together",
where the notion of thesaurus classes, pragmatic meaning and context was not
able to be interpreted as variables. Thus, the computer was able to understand
questions like "How many games did the Yankees play in May?", but it was not able
to interpret questions like: "If the number of customers Tom gets is twice the square
of 20 per cent of the number of advertisements he runs, and the number of
advertisements he runs is 45, what is the number of customers Tom gets?"

1 The theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks normally
requiring human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-
making, and translation between languages.
2Meaning of words, sentences and the overall meaning they develop all together
combined.
3 The contextually determined language. Pragmatics is how people understand language, in
the relationship with context and other information that is not present in the moment.
2. The Current State of Artificial Intelligence
From the early 1960s to 2018, there have been numerous achievements in the A.I.
research field. The concept of Machine Learning has been developed, which can be
seen by the accomplishment of Google's acquired start-up "Deep Mind", where
they developed an A.I. which can learn complex games all by itself and win games
opposing the current World Champions. Just after 1 year later, "Open A.I." (another
A.I. project which is led by Elon Musk) has been able to go even further, and defeat
champions in a much more complex and challenging video game.

Along with computational problem-solving, linguistic development has also

developed. Apple Siri is a product developed and launched by Apple Inc. October
2011. Siri was capable to understand a spoken language and do simple tasks from
calling someone from the contact list or sending an email. Also, Google's new
Speech Recognition has implemented to Youtube.com which can transcript an
entire video, and also simultaneously translate it to another language.

But all of these products are not even close the definition of A.I. And when set
against various other technological achievements, A.I. is behind it's expected
schedule, despite the billions of dollars of investment and thousands of people
working on it. While the translation of Google's translation software is effective in
translating basic semantic structures, it's not able to translate complex sentences.
Where Apple Siri's cannot understand complex syntax that people use in their day-
to-day lives. It seems that we humans, learn how to communicate with the machine,
rather than the expected vice versa.

3. The Problem of the Development of Artificial Intelligence

Although A.I can solve complex problems and do beyond human activities in a very
short time, it is not able to understand the pragmatic meaning. The computer is not
able to insert the variables of context, current situation, and the speaker's intentions
into the meaning of sentence it receives.

For example, while two friends are walking on the city street and both are trying to
figure out what to do, and the speaker asks: "I would love a cup of coffee"

The speaker is not trying to say: "I will feel the emotion of love if there was a cup of
coffee in my hands". Rather, he is trying to communicate with his/her conversational
partner. He wants to drink together with him/her. Thereby what the speaker is saying
can be translated pragmatically: "I want to drink together" or "Let's drink coffee
together"

The computer is only able to understand the first sentence above. Although
companies have developed numerous tricks and carefully programmed "context
strict" meanings behind words, underneath it is still not able to understand
pragmatics as we humans do. We can say that the same "relationship problem"
between Linguistics and Computer Engineering has not been solved.

4. Conclusion
Since programming every single Pragmatic meaning of a "string of words" a
language can create, with the variables of context, situation, time frame, short-term
happenings etc. is not practical and unmanageable if not impossible, pragmatics
should be analyzed and studies in a way that can be used in A.I. development.
Pragmatics is a crucial component of linguistic communication and it is often
overlooked by both computer engineers and linguists. There should be research and
attempts to define a pragmatic "pattern" among pragmatic language, in order to a
functioning "Algorithm" been developed in the field of A.I....

References
Rosenberg, Richard S. (Feb. 1975) Artificial Intelligence and Linguistics: A Brief
History of a One-Way Relationship.

Saygin, Ayse Pinar - Cicekli, Ilyas (1999) Pragmatics in human-computer

conversations

Matthews, Dr. Brian - CCLRC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory - Semantic Web

Technologies

Lolli, Fabrizio M. A. (2008) Semantics and pragmatics in actual software applications

and in web search engines: exploring innovations

Karpov, A. A., Ronzhin A.L (2004) Semantic-pragmatic processing of natural

language for automatic speech understanding systems