Machine And Language

Artificial intelligence since it first appeared face the challenge from unknown and shoulder the expectation about future. At the same time there are full of endless controversy and confusion in this field. Artificial intelligence which is established in the Dartmouth Meeting(1956) already has sixty years of history. In the sixty years, AI had been developing rapidly in the early, but quickly fallen into winter in the regret and the doubt. After its ups and downs, AI made striking achievements and got into the intractable troubles. In 2010 to 2015, with the generalization of the Internet, the breakthrough of computational capabilities, the advancements of intelligent algorithms, as well as the rise of these concepts which includs cloud computing and big data, AI research have come to center stage once again and become the focus of world attention.Even so, the difficulties faced by AI does not seem to decrease. Among these difficulties, the problem which is most concerned by these philosophers is that whether AI can have the possibility to obtain semantic ability. When AI got into the troubles, some philosophers had commented on it. The reason why the development of AI have stalled is that machines only operat in syntax, and can’t acquire semantic content. Semantic realization has become the bottleneck of AI theory and AI research,which is difficult to handle but necessary to overcome. In this paper, the relationship bewteen machines and language will be the main content. The focus is to quest the history, the beginnings and the manifestation of semantic problem in AI. The purpose is to separate semantic problem which is important and inevitable from other issues about AI.This paper is divided into six chapters. Chapter One is Introduction, which is describes the origin of semantic issues of AI, the review of researches on AI from home and broad, and the significance and ideas of this research.Chapter Two is Pursuing Intelligence: Theoretical Background of AI. This chapter is collating of data about AI basic theory from three perspectives. From the perspective of the historical origins, this chapter explores the ancient Greek notions of natural intelligence, then analyzes these philosophical debate of intelligent in the modern philosophy, in the end composes these efforts to achieve intelligent computing. From the perspective of research paradigm, it introduces symbolism, connectionism, and behaviorism of AI in chronological order. From the perspective of conceptual analysis, it discusses the strong AI and the weak AI, and lists these views about AI in epistemology. In the end of this chapter, it clarifies the relationship between AI and cognitive science, artificial life, philosophy of information.Chapter Three is The Beginnings and the Progresses: Semantic Exploration of AI in the early. The first section discusses about David Hilbert and his Entscheidungsproblem, Alan Turing and his halting problem, and then gives some comments about the Turing Test. The second section analyzes the development of Natural Language Processing and the evolution of Chomsky Linguistics.After studing the development and the evolution, this thesis make the language analysis procedure clear. Language analysis is experienced the diversion from naturalization analysis to formal analysis, and from formal analysis back to semantic analysis. These two diversions have important significant and influence on the semantic problem of AI.Chapter Four is The Doubt and the Reflection: Philosophy pioneer on the semantic problem of AI. This chapter analyzes Hubert Dreyfus’ and John Searle’s semantic criticism to AI. Dreyfus in What Computers Can’t Do: The Limits of Artificial Intelligence criticizes these program semantics one by one from Marvin Minsky’s Semantic Information Processing. John Searle presents the Chinese Room Argument in Mind, Brain and Procedures, clearly puts forward the semantic problems of AI, which led to numerous debates and produced a great influence.Chapter Five is The Semantic Problem in Linguistics. This chapter analyzes the status of semantics in the semiotics trichotomy, discusses the relationship between semantics and syntactics, pragmatics, and the relationship between nutural language and thought language. Chapter Six is The Epilogue. The focus is to articulate the opinions about AI from three perspectives. First, the meaning of the man-machine war is to create a new environment, to develop a new space, tp open up a new area for the research and application of AI. Second, Language is the core of intelligence, and the semantic problem is inevitable on the road of AI. Now, with the rapid development of artificial intelligence, semantic problem of AI is more urgent and practical than we suppose. Third, the difference views of Artificial intelligence depend on the viewing angle where you are, and is also limited to the philosophy about intelligence and semantics.All in All, in the exploring and thinking about artificial intelligence, what we need is the courage to look into the distance, and not to scare for unknown; what we need is the faith to be down-to-earth, and not to worry about the long road ahead. It is conceivable that artificial intelligence in the next few years will achieve what kind of wonderful and amazing performance and development; It is also conceivable that the philosophy of artificial intelligence in the next few years will lead how kind of sophisticated and realistic debate and ideological trend.