Teaching natural language to computers

“Natural Language,” whether spoken and attended to by humans, or processed and generated by computers, requires a series of structures and networks that reflect creative processes in semantic, syntactic, phonetic, linguistic, social, emotional, and cultural modules. Being able to produce novel and useful behavior following repeated practice gets to the root of both artificial intelligence and human language. This paper investigates current modalities involved in language-like applications that computers – and programmers – are engaged with, and seeks ways of fine tuning the questions we ask, to better account for context, self-awareness, and embodiment.