From: Joscha Bach To: Jeffrey Epstein <[email protected]> Cc: Bamaby Marsh <M Ila> Subject: Re: Date: Wed, 01 Mar 2017 19:29:19 +0000 Thank you, Jeffrey! This is from Noam, right? I would be very interested in reading the responses of linguists and computational language modelers to this. May I forward it to a friend at Google X? Some notes: > basic assumptions about human language that should I think be uncontroversial, extensively discussed elsewhere, then turning to a sample of challenges. A person's language is an internal system, part of human biology, based on configurations of the brain, developing in each person through interaction of specific biological endowment (the topic of UG — universal grammar in contemporary terminology), external environment, and general properties and principles of growth and development that are independent of language. As far as I understand, there is not yet an agreement among linguists wrt. UG, i.e. how much is innate vs. do humans just converge on the simplest type 3 grammar that is consistent with the constraints they observe in their local environment. I think Noam argues that we have very specific circuitry for language, whereas the other camp would suggest that we are general learners, with specific rewards that bias us towards compositionality and systematicity. OTOH, this might also be read as a variant of Noam's "Strong Minimalist Thesis" (SMT). The controversy will be eventually resolved by progress in building systems that learn natural language. > The acquired system is an "internal language" (I-language), a computational system that yields an infinite array of hierarchically structured expressions that are interpreted at the conceptual-intentional CI interface as, in effect, a "language of thought" (LOT), and that can be externalized to one or another sensorymotor system, typically sound. Also relevant are some considerations about evolution of language. > Little is known about the evolut