The Human Language in Speech and Writing

This is an exert from some of our (Schuster, Lee, Ehsani, Allen, Rogers) recent research:

"At the most basic level of communication, words are the glue that connects nearly everything together. The power of words can give descriptive meaning to the most complex physical objects existing in nature, and to the most diffuse ideas that exist only in the mind. Words establish not only the limits of human imagination and intellect, but also the possibilities for the computing systems of the future.

The fundamental problem with employing words as a descriptor is that a single word can have several different definitions and multiple words can have the same definition. This paradox means that natural language often does not have the internal consistency required for straightforward application as an identifier or a unit of meaning within computer systems.

Further, words frequently change meaning over time. In a famous passage from Cratylus,* a dialogue by Plato, one of the main characters named Heraclitus states, "All is flux, nothing is stationary." The early Greek thinkers were so concerned about the effect of flux (change) on written and spoken language that some felt a rigorous system of logic based on words impossible to accomplish. Achieving the goal of word descriptions that are constant and machine understandable requires a deeper appreciation of the role of semantics in computing systems.

Since about 1600 AD, various published dictionaries of English have overcome many of the problems associated with language flux. With higher education levels in Western society during the industrial revolution the use of words as descriptors, improved writing, and rapid communication by telegraph became fundamental to the growth of commerce.

The modern emergence of WordNet (Fellbaum, 1998), a comprehensive online dictionary developed by Professor George A. Miller and colleagues at Princeton University, goes a step further in enhancing the consistency of English. WordNet includes the innovation of a weak ontology for groupings such as synonyms and antonyms. This provides powerful word relationships. Even so, the intent of WordNet is for reference. It has not been a tool widely used in computer science until recently."

Fellbaum, F., Ed. 1998. WordNet: An Electronic Lixical Database (Language, Speech, and Communication. 1st Ed. The MIT Press.

*Sedley, D. 2007. Plato's Cratylus. 1st Ed. Cambridge University Press.