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What’s blocking AI/AGI progress?
with Robert D. Van Valin featuring his ongoing work to solve linguistics
I was lucky to be able to catch up with Robert D. Van Valin, Jr. in Santa Fe this week at the New Mexican restaurant, Tomasita’s, as an extra stop on my US and European book tour. We used the opportunity to solve AI over lunch, like solving-the-problems-of-the-world that other’s do! It’s always an amazing experience to talk to the most consequential linguist in this century and the last about his experiences in linguistics and its impact on Artificial Intelligence (AI) in general.
For those who don’t know Professor Van Valin (I call him ‘Van’) he is the primary developer of Role and Reference Grammar (RRG), a linguistic framework that models all of the world’s diverse languages in which words and phrases (morphosyntax) link to meaning in context (key part of knowledge) and back. The analysis of human language with RRG is extensive — the latest book is more than 1000 pages to cover the breadth of focus areas in language.
By the way, the next RRG international conference is in Kobe, Japan and I’ll be talking about my industry experience in using RRG for machines to interact using language. (Kobe RRG Conference Details linked here).
