INFERENTIAL MEMORY AS THE BASIS OF MACHINES WHICH UNDERSTAND NATURAL LANGUAGE

Participants in the search for intelligent machines frequently disagree on a basic question of strategy in their quest. On the one hand there are those who believe that the major obstacles can be overcome by reliance on the computer's infallible memory, electronic speed, and arithmetic capabilities uig This report takes the position that immediate, practical applica can derive from the former approach, but the major problems will be "\ To mention a single example, the implementation f information retrieval techniques on present-day computers would be a large step forward, even though the techniques thus far considered have largely been conceptually trivial. Luhn (1958) has u sed a straightforward statistical procedure to extract key sentences from scientific articles, thus yielding useful abstracts of a sort. For even an unintelligent human does more than count frequencies or search for key words. The human displays intelligent features which are generally summed up by saying that he ...