Natural Language as AI technology

Languages likes English or French are discussed by Linguists not by computer scientists. A language is located in the humanities but not within the mathematics department. So its logical that most Linguists have no idea about computer science and vice versa. This might explain why AI research wasn't succesful over decades, because Natural langauge is the missing puzzle piece to make machines intelligent.

From a birds eye perspective, a language like English consists of verbs, nouns and adjectives. The grammar consists of rules how to connect the words to sentences. And language also is directed towards the reality. A word like "a flying bird" or "green flower" is referencing to objects which are available in front of the speaker.

The ability to name every object from the reality with a word and describe activities also with words makes natural language a powerful technology which can be used for human to human communication and machine to human communication both. In case of Artificial Intelligence a computer needs to parse natural language which is the bottleneck in modern AI research. Suppose a computer program asks the user to enter a word. The user enters "red box", then the computer stores the input in a variable but it has no consequences. So the computer isn't able to understand the meaning.

This parsing problem can be solved by inventing a language game. A language game is similar to a 2d arcade game a rule book which explain who to react to a certain input pattern. Typical language oriented games are translation games, the board game Scrabble or the "guess what" game. After implementing these games on a computer, the input of a human will have consequences. The consequences are given by the rules of a certain game, for example in a translation game the user needs to enter the correct translation for a word from another language. The computer verifies if the answer is correct.

Strictly spoken, not the computer decides about the meaning but the rules of the language games are providing the meaning. Modern AI research after the year 2020 is mostly focused on natural language and language games like "Visual question answering", "instruction following" and "question answering chatbots". All these games are formalizing the human to machine interaction in a sense that the computer can determine a score. This score allows to train artificial neural networks. The result of the training process is recognized as Artificial Intelligence in the modern sense. It allows to control robots with language instructions, and generate text with Large language models.

A common assumption in the past was that its very complicated to parse natural language with a computer. This assumption is only correct if the entire corpus of English should be understand by a computer which is around 1 million words and stored in endless amount of books. Parsing this written language with a computer is indeed a hard problem for computer science. What is possible instead is to reduce the task to a subset of English which consists of a dozens words from a restricted domain which are used to play a language game. In the minimal case, there are 6 picture cards and 6 word cards and the task is to match the correct pairs. Such a language game can be implemented in a short computer program and can be played by an automated AI algorithm. The AI algorithm has access to a database with the correct answers. This allows the computer to connect the picture of a banana with the word "banana".