Linguistics for the Age of AI

[Amirouche Boubekki]

A human-inspired, linguistically sophisticated model of language
understanding for intelligent agent systems.

The open access edition of this book was made possible by generous
funding from Arcadia – a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter
Baldwin.

One of the original goals of artificial intelligence research was to
endow intelligent agents with human-level natural language
capabilities. Recent AI research, however, has focused on applying
statistical and machine learning approaches to big data rather than
attempting to model what people do and how they do it. In this book,
Marjorie McShane and Sergei Nirenburg return to the original goal of
recreating human-level intelligence in a machine. They present a
human-inspired, linguistically sophisticated model of language
understanding for intelligent agent systems that emphasizes
meaning—the deep, context-sensitive meaning that a person derives from
spoken or written language.

With Linguistics for the Age of AI, McShane and Nirenburg offer a
roadmap for creating language-endowed intelligent agents (LEIAs) that
can understand,explain, and learn. They describe the
language-understanding capabilities of LEIAs from the perspectives of
cognitive modeling and system building, emphasizing
“actionability”—which involves achieving interpretations that are
sufficiently deep, precise, and confident to support reasoning about
action. After detailing their microtheories for topics such as
semantic analysis, basic coreference, and situational reasoning,
McShane and Nirenburg turn to agent applications developed using those
microtheories and evaluations of a LEIA's language understanding
capabilities.

McShane and Nirenburg argue that the only way to achieve human-level
language understanding by machines is to place linguistics front and
center, using statistics and big data as contributing resources. They
lay out a long-term research program that addresses linguistics and
real-world reasoning together, within a comprehensive cognitive
architecture.

https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/5042/Linguistics-for-the-Age-of-AI

--
Amirouche ~ https://hyper.dev