A new Cornell study suggests language use is simpler than they had thought.

Co-author Morten Christiansen, Cornell professor of psychology and co-director of the Cornell Cognitive Science Program, and his colleagues say that language is actually based on simpler sequential structures, like clusters of beads on a string.

"What we're suggesting is that the language system deals with words by grouping them into little clumps that are then associated with meaning," he said. ...
For more than 50 years, language scientists have assumed that sentence structure is fundamentally hierarchical, made up of small parts in turn made of smaller parts, like Russian nesting dolls. language is naturally sequential, given the temporal cues that help us understand and be understood as we use language.

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 Despite Watson's tremendous performance, the Final Jeopardy question at the end of Tuesday night's airing revealed the Achilles' heel that computer scientists have known all along: Watson doesn't really "think" anything, and it struggles with simple questions that most humans can answer without a second thought. Most of the clues on the "Jeopardy" board mention proper nouns -- specific places, events, people, songs, books and so on, says Dr. Douglas Lenat, a machine learning pioneer, former Stanford professor of computer science and CEO of Cycorp, a company that develops semantic technologies. But if that date had been part of the clue, could Watson correctly pick out [Schubert's] maternal grandmother's birth date from a list where only one of the dates was earlier than 1797?" We could, because we understand that everyone is younger than their own mother and grandmother, but Watson is unable to understand this, Lenat explained.

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