Edward Gibson: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Do you have hope for machine translation that it can break down the barriers of language? So while all these different diverse languages exist, I guess there’s many ways of asking this question, but basically how hard is it to translate in an automated way for one language to another? There’s going to be cases where it’s going to be really hard. So there are concepts that are in one language and not another. The most extreme kinds of cases are these cases of number information. So good luck translating a lot of English into Piraha. It’s just impossible. There’s no way to do it because there are no words for these concepts that we’re talking about. There’s probably the flip side. There’s probably stuff in Piraha, which is going to be hard to translate into English on the other side. And so I just don’t know what those concepts are. The space, the world space is a little different from my world space, so I don’t know what the things they talk about, things it’s going to have to do with their life as opposed to my industrial life, which is going to be different. And so there’s going to be problems like that always. Maybe it’s not so bad in the case of some of these spaces, and maybe it’s going to be hard or others. And so it’s pretty bad in number. It’s extreme, I’d say in the number space, exact number space. But in the color dimension, that’s not so bad. But it’s a problem that you don’t have to talk about the concepts. And there might be entire concepts that are missing. So to you, it’s more about the space of concept versus the space of form. Like form you can probably map.…

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