In the Beginning was Information

weak” was translated into Russian and then translated back. The resultwas “The vodka is strong, but the steak is bad.”Joseph Weizenbaum of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Boston,USA) wrote a program called ELIZA in which he ignored linguistic analyses,but employed a fixed answering schema thought to be sufficientlyrefined. The only result obtained, was an understanding of language thatwas totally unrealistic. This program looked for certain words or wordsamples in the expressions of the input text, and selected suitable answersfrom a set of stored sentences or sample sentences. If, for example, a sentencecontaining the word “mother” is entered, then the system looks for astandard sentence in which this word occurs and responds with: “Tell memore about your mother.” Most of the entered words are ignored by theprogram, but in spite of this, a very extensive background library isrequired for dealing with the large number of possible sentences that canbe formulated by a person to give the impression of conversing with him.Conclusion: The problem of enabling a computer to deal with natural languageis still unsolved and will never be resolved. It is not possible to modela comprehension of semantic categories (e. g. metaphors, idioms,humour, and exaggerations), unmentioned intentions and convictions of thespeaker, or emotions and motivations, for a computer. Human abilities likecommon sense, intelligence, and creativity cannot be simulated mechanically,because the intelligent use of language includes observation, thought,and actions. Even the best programs used for speech processing do notknow what they are talking about, in the truest sense of this expression.Computer programs which would really be able to imitate language comprehensionand perform correct translations fail as far as the following areconcerned:– Comprehension of meaning: A program cannot “understand” semanticrelationships, neither can it link them with one another.– Grammatical analysis: When translating text, a grammatical analysis isrequired initially. A program which analyses some text without consideringits meaning will not be able to analyse numerous sentencescorrectly.– Language usage depends on its context: The meaning of a sentencecannot be found by adding the meanings of single words. What ismore, the meaning of single words depends on the context in whichthey appear.– Language employs background knowledge: Each and every sentence isrooted in a specific frame of reference and it can often only be understoodin terms of a knowledge of this background.– The richness of a language resides in poetic turns of speech and in itsmetaphors. These occur much more frequently in everyday speech than221