Language and Intelligence: What Can/Cannot AI Do with Natural Language? (2022)

In this talk, the author argues that certain pragmatic features of natural language—termed 'productivity' and 'malleability,' in addition to syntactical generativity and semantical compositionality—are not only hard but even impossible to capture in an artificial language used by an AI system. The reason is said to lie in deep metaphysical differences between artificial and natural intelligence, accounting for differences in their respective processes of concept-formation. The paper appears in Proceedings NCMA 2022 (EPTCS 367, 2022, pp. 1-10; arXiv:2209.12829).