An Enactivist account of Mind Reading in Natural Language Understanding

Abstract

In this paper we apply our understanding of the radical enactivist agenda to a classic AI-hard problem. Natural Language Understanding is a sub-field of AI research that looked easy to the pioneers. Thus the Turing Test, in its original form, assumed that the computer could use language and the challenge was to fake human intelligence. It turned out that playing chess and formal logic were easy compared to the necessary language skills. The techniques of good old-fashioned AI (GOFAI) assume symbolic representation is the core of reasoning and human communication consisted of transferring representations from one mind to another. But by this model 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.