It is the custom to put speaking and listening in opposition: one man speaks, the other listens. But listening accompanies and surrounds not only speaking such as takes place in conversation.
The simultaneousness of speaking and listening has a larger meaning. Speaking is of itself a listening. Speaking is listening to the language which we speak. Thus, it is a listening not while but before we are speaking. This listening to language also comes before all other kinds of listening that we know, in a most inconspicuous manner.
We do not merely speak the language—we speak by way of it. We can do so solely because we always have already listened to the language. What do we hear there? Here's one more example. Whorf said that because English treats time as being broken up into chunks that can be counted—three days, four minutes, half an hour—English speakers tend to treat time as a group of objects—seconds, minutes, hours—instead of as a smooth unbroken stream. This, he said, makes us think that time is 'stuff' that can be saved, wasted, or lost.
The Hopi, he said, don't talk about time in those terms, and so they think about it differently; for them it is a continuous cycle. But this doesn't necessarily mean that our language has forced a certain view of time on us; it could also be that our view of time is reflected in our language, or that the way we deal with time in our culture is reflected in both our language and our thoughts. It seems likely that language, thought, and culture form three strands of a braid, with each one affecting the others.
Much of the time, yes. But not always. You can easily conjure up mental images and sensations that would be hard to describe in words. You can think about the sound of a symphony, the shape of a pear, or the smell of garlic bread.
None of these thoughts require language. Take colors, for example. There are an infinite number of different colors, and they don't all have their own names. If you have a can of red paint and slowly add blue to it, drop by drop, it will very slowly change to a reddish purple, then purple, then bluish purple. Each drop will change the color very slightly, but there is no one moment when it will stop being red and become purple. The color spectrum is continuous. Our language, however, isn't continuous.
Our language makes us break the color spectrum up into 'red', 'purple', and so on. The Dani of New Guinea have only two basic color terms in their language, one for 'dark' colors including blue and green and one for 'light' colors including yellow and red. Their language breaks up the color spectrum differently from ours. But that doesn't mean they can't see the difference between yellow and red; studies have shown that they can see different colors just as English speakers can.
In Russian, there are two different words for light blue and dark blue. Does this mean that Russian speakers think of these as 'different' colors, while having one word blue causes English speakers to think of them as the same?
Do you think of red and pink as different colors? If so, you may be under the influence of your language; after all, pink is really just light red. So our language doesn't force us to see only what it gives us words for, but it can affect how we put things into groups. One of the jobs of a child learning language is to figure out which things are called by the same word. After learning that the family's St. Cyborg: Isn't there a difference between creative imagination and computational creativity?
AF: Here's the thing. Researchers have constructed the so called FACE model that is able to describe creative acts as structures of generative acts, and the IDEA model that describes the impact of such creative acts.
Cyborg: Any examples of poetry generated using CCT? AF: Simon Colton and his colleagues Jacob Goodwin and Tony Veale have provided a language based poetry generation system, the full-FACE model, which constructs poems according to given constraints of rhythm, rhyme and sentiment with selected word frequencies and similarities.
By language based, we mean using as input a body of language such as the British National Corpus to train a piece of software which can then construct a mood for the day, by analysing newspaper articles, say the Guardian newspaper, then use these to determine both an article to base a poem on and a template for a poem. WASP, the Wishful Automatic Spanish Poet, has been used to explore the generation of poetry not according to fixed stanzas, but instead based on generic principles of symmetry in the size of the lines and the coincidence of rhyme across them.
This generates poems in which the structure of the stanza basically emerges from the constraints imposed by the language. Cyborg: what does that mean in terms of consciousness and authorship?
You said your original discussions touched on these aspects. AF: Let's look at consciousness first: so long as we humans confront what we may call a poetic text, it talks us and our world into a new focus, regardless of whether it was made by human or robot. I would argue like Heidegger that language brings us and our world into conscious existence. Cyborg: What happens to the author with AI poetry?
AF: As for the author or what Michel Foucault calls the author function, well, didn't Roland Barthes assert that the author is dead? This poses some difficulty with the format of PIW.
The paradigm of poems per country per poet doesn't fit — that's why we have created AI Poetry as a new country, which appears alphabetically next to Afghanistan!
Cyborg: But what does this mean in the context of computer generated poetry? AF: It means that we can no longer centre the poem on the poet, their person, their history, their taste or their passions, even if we wanted to. Because the poem is no longer anyone's confession or confidence. The author is not here anymore. What we have instead is software and big data, such as the large corpora of languages of many flavours, like the Japanese Wikipedia for the Tanka generators.
Is it the algorithm and the data sets behind them that replace the author or is it the authors of the algorithms or the methods that generate the poems? The authors of the algorithm are often mainly AI experts rather than poets. So we are dealing with disembodied poem generators, not poets. Cyborg: where does that leave the question of the meaning of language or the semantics of poetry?
AF: This language is neither mimetic nor expressive. It doesn't represent an external reality, nor does it express a pre-existing thought or feeling. On the other hand, language shapes consciousness and perception, calling things into being, it doesn't merely designate or label objects. Following in the footsteps of Wittgenstein's philosophical Investigations into the origin of meaning in usage, both psychologists and linguists have started investigating the idea that the meaning of a word may be derived from its observed occurrences in text.
Not only in one poem or one piece of text but in the way it is distributed in a larger corpora of texts, showing patterns of word usage. In other words, to generate meaningful text, algorithms don't have to know the external world as such. To make sense it is sufficient to know the way each word is distributed or associated with other words in larger bodies of text.
Distributional semantic models have been used to measure the degree of semantic coherence in poetry versus random text. It has been possible to show that bodies of poetry operate within certain limits of coherence that is distinct from everyday speech, as well as from randomness. In other words patterns of poetic language make sense in a way that random generation of text doesn't.
Cyborg: What about the aesthetic value of an AI generated poem?
0コメント