Finding knowledge and information is becoming an almost trivial task on the web. Understanding its value, the credibility and perspective of its source, on the other hand, is becoming increasingly problematic. Technology lags behind when it comes to providing users with proper tools. READ MORE
Category: Spinoza Prize Workshop
Looking at the Long Tail of Language
The distribution of symbols in natural language and their meanings are no exception to Zipf’s law: a small amount of observations are very frequent and there is a very long tail of low frequent observations. READ MORE
Can Machines Understand Language?
According to John Searle, this is fundamentally impossible. He used the Chinese Room thought-experiment to demonstrate that computers follow instructions to manipulate symbols without understanding of these symbols. William van Orman Quine even questioned the understanding of language by humans, since symbols are only grounded through approximation by cultural situational convention. READ MORE