Page 46 - Monocle Quarterly Journal Vol 3 Issue 2 Spring

MONOCLE QUARTERLY JOURNAL | DEEP LEARNING
context or social propriety, a shortfall that would likely become more obvious in a more spontaneous or lengthy real-world interaction.
A 2018 WIRED article further explains how X.ai – an American company active in the digital assistant market – is trying to create a chatbot that can schedule meetings for busy professionals. But even this seemingly straightforward task is proving immensely complex, thanks to the quirks of natural human language. The developers have found that often people send meeting requests that are muddled by conversational niceties and “small talk”, or that are ambiguous when describing their availability. The chatbots are programmed to send responses asking for clarification, but it can be arduous and frustrating for the user if they must respond to several emails just to schedule a meeting. In a bid to try to prepare for every conversational possibility, X.ai’s trainers are feeding a vast amount of data into the system in a tireless quest to refine the algorithm to the point where it will be able to communicate with all the nuances and flexibility that a human does. Whether or not the machines will ever be able to communicate like a human, however, remains uncertain. And this is because language does not only perform a practical function – enabling us to share content with one another – but a far more abstract social one as well.
The Dual Functions of Language
In The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature (2007), Steven Pinker cements the idea that language is a distinctly human trait, by focusing on how our use of language reveals insights into the internal dynamics of how we think. As arbitrary – and at times, irksome – as using correct grammar may seem, Pinker argues that we have come to a consensus to use certain words in certain ways for a particular reason. The way we speak reflects the way we think, betraying the intuitive physics that underpin our understandings of the world. Prepositions, for example, reflect our conceptions of space, whilst nouns reflect our conceptions of matter, tenses our conception of time and verbs our conception of causality. The words we use are anything but arbitrary – they are intended to communicate very specific meanings, which are aligned with the mental models and cognition processes we use to make sense of the world.
Pinker does not, however, advocate the idea that language is merely the tool by which we communicate our thoughts to others, much like a memory stick that can take information from one computer and transfer it to another. After all, we do not only use language to describe when an event occurred, or where an object is currently placed. He reminds us that we are always communicating with someone else, explaining that language therefore has a dual purpose: it must convey content whilst negotiating a social relationship. The phrase “if you could pass me the salt, that would be awesome,” for example, does not make much literal sense
...language therefore has a
dual purpose: it must convey
content whilst negotiating a social relationship.
and is a highly inefficient way to communicate, if all the speaker wants is the salt. But the speaker is aware that they are making a request of another person and will not wish to sound overly demanding – so they hedge the request in a way that is more polite. Language, then, is doing something far more complex than simply transferring our internal thoughts to one another. It is continuously confirming that we belong to a social group.
The social function of language is evident in the fact that when we communicate, very rarely do we do so in a manner that would convey content in the simplest and clearest way. Often, we use language in a very abstract way, relying on the listener’s human ability to understand what is being said in context. Metaphor, together with the combinatorial power of language – what Pinker refers to as “the infinite use of finite means” – makes possible infinite creativity in language, and infinite meaning. When we interpret an utterance, we draw on a vast body of knowledge about the world and about people, combining this with our own experiences to instinctively interpret what is being said. In addition, we temper our interpretation with a host of other information – such as the person’s tone, the length of their pauses, their body language and facial expressions – which helps us to understand what the person actually means.
It is unlikely that neuroscientists will ever be able to prove the existence of Chomsky’s universal grammar – for this was a concept that he invented to produce
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