An Enactivist account of Mind Reading in Natural Language Understanding

TL;DR

This paper explores how enactivist philosophy can inform natural language understanding by emphasizing direct perception of intentions over symbolic representations, challenging traditional AI paradigms.

Contribution

It applies enactivist ideas to NLU, proposing a shift from symbolic to perception-based understanding of human communication.

Findings

Enactivist perspective offers a new approach to NLU.

Traditional AI relies on symbolic representations, which may be insufficient.

Direct perception of intentions could improve language understanding systems.

Abstract

In this paper we apply our understanding of the radical enactivist agenda to the classic AI-hard problem of Natural Language Understanding. When Turing devised his famous test the assumption was that a computer could use language and the challenge would be to mimic human intelligence. It turned out playing chess and formal logic were easy compared to understanding what people say. The techniques of good old-fashioned AI (GOFAI) assume symbolic representation is the core of reasoning and by that paradigm human communication consists of transferring representations from one mind to another. However, one finds that representations appear in another's mind, without appearing in the intermediary language. People communicate by mind reading it seems. Systems with speech interfaces such as Alexa and Siri are of course common, but they are limited. Rather than adding mind reading skills, we introduced a "cheat" that enabled our systems to fake it. The cheat is simple and only slightly interesting to computer scientists and not at all interesting to philosophers. However, reading about the enactivist idea that we "directly perceive" the intentions of others, our cheat took on a new light and in this paper look again at how natural language understanding might actually work between humans.