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Andrew Van Wagner's avatar

Fantastic article; really, really good.

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Kaleberg's avatar

There used to be a thing called dissociated-press in the Gnu EMACS text editor. It may still be there for all I know. You loaded up a text file and let it rip. It appended text to the end of file that sort of read like stuff in the file. It worked by choosing a piece of the file and searching for it elsewhere in the file, then it appended the stuff right after the string it found to the end of the file, then it grabbed a bit more of the file after the string it used and repeated the process and searched for that string. Short sequences of words always made sense and those sequences were usually joined correctly, but the overall result was sort of dissociated, hence the name, a play on the Associated Press.

Jorge Luis Borges once wrote of an infinite library in one of his short stories. Imagine running dissociated-press on that library perhaps by invoking a surreal mechanism worthy of Borges. The result would always make sense on the fine scale and sort of work syntactically at the sentence level, but the overall result would be gibberish. If it ran long enough it would tell every truth and every falsehood. It might be very entertaining but not very useful.

Modern generative language systems always remind me of William's syndrome. From an article on the syndrome: "Children with Williams syndrome are chatty, have rich vocabularies and love to tell stories. Yet they have trouble learning certain complex rules of grammar." "The new work, however, finds that children with the syndrome do not understand passive sentences that use abstract verbs, such as ‘love’ or ‘remember.’" "Healthy children learn actional passives by age 5, but don’t learn psychological passives until around age 8." There's a theory that people with William's syndrome often became court jesters as they could be most entertaining.

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