Machine learning won't solve natural language understanding
Caveat lector: I&#x27;m analysing this as a linguist. Not as a programmer. (Unless you count a bunch of bash scripts as &quot;programming&quot;.)<p>&gt;Let us start first with describing what we call the “missing text phenomenon” (MTP), that we believe is at the heart of all challenges in natural language understanding.<p>The missing text is not the heart of the challenge; it&#x27;s just a surface issue. The actual problem is deeper - machines treat words as if they got intrinsic meaning, when the meaning is actually negotiated between speaker and hearer at the moment of the utterance.<p>This might sound complicated so, as an example, let&#x27;s say I told you: &quot;I got a cat. That wug sleeps on my bed.&quot;<p>You don&#x27;t know what&#x27;s a &quot;wug&quot; (it&#x27;s a nonsensical word BTW), or why I&#x27;m calling my cat a &quot;wug&quot;. So you&#x27;re missing info, just like the machine, right? And yet you&#x27;re able to parse the second sentence just fine, based on the first. And if we keep chatting about my cats, any mention of the word &quot;wug&quot; will represent the feline from the picture. We effectively negotiated the word &quot;wug&quot; to represent that cat.<p>A machine does not do that; instead it&#x27;ll give words intrinsic, non-negotiable meanings. It won&#x27;t have &quot;wug&quot; in its dataset, so it won&#x27;t understand that sentence.<p>I don&#x27;t believe that machine learning will solve this issue _on its own_, but it could once we&#x27;re able to simulate that negotiation of meanings.<p>&gt;Was Aristotle really Aristotle?<p>If I saw this sentence &quot;in the wild&quot;, I&#x27;d immediately interpret it as someone questioning the historicity of Aristotle, and claiming his works were made by someone else. It shows that the question is not as redundant as it might look like.<p>&gt; The trophy did not fit in the suitcase because it was too &#x2F;&#x2F; 1a.  small &#x2F;&#x2F; 1b.  big<p>This specific example doesn&#x27;t show it, but that ambiguity is an issue even for human beings, as shown by<p>&quot;I dropped the trophy on the table. Now it&#x27;s broken.&quot; (What&#x27;s broken - the trophy, or the table?)<p>In fact, it&#x27;s such a big issue that languages often have a bunch of resources to minimise those situations, as gender agreement and distal&#x2F;proximal pronouns.