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Can a Robot Learn a Language the Way a Child Does? (zdnet.com)
MIT researchers have devised a way to train semantic parsers by mimicking the way a child learns language. "The system observes captioned videos and associates the words with recorded actions and objects," ZDNet reports, citing the paper presented this week. "It could make it easier to train parsers, and it could potentially improve human interactions with robots." From the report: To train their parser, the researchers combined a semantic parser with a computer vision component trained in object, human and activity recognition in video. Next, they compiled a dataset of about 400 videos depicting people carrying out actions such as picking up an object or walking toward an object. Participants on the crowdsourcing platform Mechanical Turk to wrote 1,200 captions for those videos, 840 of which were set aside for training and tuning. The rest were used for testing. By associating the words with the actions and objects in a video, the parser learns how sentences are structured. With that training, it can accurately predict the meaning of a sentence without a video.
MIT has been claiming this type of BS for decades. They haven't done anything. Literally they have been talking about this since the 1970s. Think about it: if it worked it would have been incorporated into something like Siri and be worth billions. But Siri is pathetic.
What if we rephrased the question, e.g., "What would an AI need to be able to acquire grammar and semantics by being trained on natural language sentences (the way human children are)?"
Those of us who have a mechanistic position on consciousness and intelligence see no theoretical obstacle to building a machine that does anything or indeed everything humans do. But many of us are dubious that AI will ever achieve true parity with the full range of human abilities. My doubts are economic in nature. I doubt that any such generalist AI will ever be the cheapest way to get whatever it is we want out of a machine.
Take the "AI" that's hot in the market now. It's not an AI like the robots in Asimov's storeis -- a mechanistic simulation of what people can do. The machine learning stuff being flogged by companies today is just a way of replacing people on certain tasks with something that is cheaper and in some case more consistent, albeit less versatile.
There's one exception to the rule that a generalist AI isn't really what we want, and that's if we want to prove a non-material soul is unnecessary for explaining anything about humanity. And I doubt anyone really cares enough about such a demonstration to pay what it would take to do it convincingly.
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It's good that we understand how humans acquire natural language well enough that 'just make the computer do it that way' is a plan.
We don't understand how humans acquire knowledge of Go, yet people made a computer that started from nothing and learned it simply by playing itself and discovering all the knowledge.
The same method has been used in many different machine learning applications, and it seems to work pretty well, regularly scoring much better results than a human.