Robert J. Marks: Simple sentences confuse AI

Fun with the grammar we take for granted:

Groucho Marx (1890–1977) used to start one of his quips with “I once shot an elephant in my pajamas.” That seems clear enough but then he follows up with “How he got into my pajamas I’ll never know.”

The punch line depends on the ambiguity of the question. At first, we interpret the words in a common-sense way; we assume that Groucho was wearing his own pajamas. The joke consists in surprising us with a grammatically possible but fantastic alternative. Contemporary comedian Emo Phillips quips that ambiguity is the devil’s volleyball.1

Computers have no sense of humor. Given the sentence without context, they don’t have a clue who is wearing Groucho’s pajamas. A class of such ambiguous expressions called Winograd Schemas2 continues to baffle AI software. Robert J. Marks, “AI is no match for ambiguity” at Mind Matters News

See also: The US 2016 Election: Why Big Data Failed Economics professor Gary Smith sheds light on the surprise result

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