For one of my courses I was asked to look at the uses of modelling in my area of teaching. As I've spent the last few years attempting to teach English as a foreign language, I thought I'd look at grammar. On the face of it grammar should be the perfect model for language learning. Learn the model for sentence structure, pop in a few words and hey presto - language!
Here's a sentence structure for an English sentence.
Subject (S) + Verb (V) + Object (O) + Adverbial (A)
So.....
“The girl sang the song beautifully.”
..fits perfectly into our model. But what about...
“My cat teaches sausages on Wednesdays.”
It fits the model - but it means nothing. Unless you have a strange cat and a packet of highly intelligent sausages!
Then again, what about...
“Strong is Vader. Mind what you have learned. Save you it can"
This doesn't fit our model, but we can understand it and, more importantly, so could Luke Skywalker and he was thus able to save the universe.
Is language too complex to be modelled accurately by computers? Will chatterbots ever really be able hold convincing conversations? Should we bother? Should we not just talk to each other?
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