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The Chinese Room: Can a Machine Ever Understand?

7 min read

John Searle’s famous “Chinese Room” thought experiment poses a timeless challenge to the idea of a truly thinking machine. By exploring the crucial difference between manipulating linguistic symbols (syntax) and truly grasping their meaning (semantics), it forces us to ask a profound question: even if an AI can speak our language perfectly, will it ever truly understand?

Computational Linguistics Technology AI Linguistics

Shattering Sentences: The Art of Tokenization

6 min read

Before any AI can understand language, it must first shatter sentences into pieces through a process called tokenization. This crucial first step is far more complex than it seems, presenting unique linguistic puzzles across different languages, from English contractions to German compound nouns and Chinese text that has no spaces. This invisible labor, where computer science meets linguistics, is the foundational work that powers our entire digital world.

AI Computational Linguistics

The Unseen World of Linguistic Annotation: The Human Hands Behind AI Language Models

6 min read

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Before an AI can understand language, a human has to teach it. This work is done by linguistic annotators, the unsung heroes who manually tag text with grammatical and semantic information, creating the training data for models like GPT. This intricate process of “treebanking” and resolving linguistic ambiguity forms the very foundation of the AI revolution.

Computational Linguistics AI Psycholinguistics

The ELIZA Effect: Why We Talk to Chatbots Like They’re Human

6 min read

Have you ever found yourself saying “please” and “thank you” to a chatbot or voice assistant? This is the ELIZA effect, our tendency to unconsciously attribute human-like intelligence and empathy to computer programs that mimic conversation. This post dives into the psychology behind this phenomenon, its origins with a 1960s “digital therapist,” and the clever linguistic tricks developers use to make machines feel more human.