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by idiocrat 1145 days ago
"He saw that gas can explode."

This ambiguous sentence stuck in my head some 30 years ago, when the AI was popular at that time.

There was a research paper discussing the issue of ambiguity.

2 comments

Right -- although many things that are ambiguous in text are disambiguated in actual speech, so the problems that arise with audio speech are not wholly the same as with text.

A classic example is the word "record", which has first syllable stress as a noun, but second syllable stress as a verb. "I bought a RECord" vs "Please reCORD the music".

(in the dominant American dialect; I don't recall about other dialects/countries)

An interesting reprint in 2003

https://www.drdobbs.com/parallel/understanding-natural-langu...

"Computers still cannot understand natural language as well as young children can. Why is it so hard?"

Source: AI Expert, May 1987