Semantic Understanding Quotes

I don't like country music, but I don't mean to denigrate those who do. And for the people who like country music, denigrate means 'put down'.

Reading is perception as translation. The inert signs of an alphabet become living meanings in the mind.

I think what's really amazing is that given the scale of the web and getting the compute power we have today, we're starting to see things that appear intelligent but actually aren't semantically intelligent.

Words exist because of meaning; once you’ve gotten the meaning, you can forget the words.

Artificial intelligence would be the ultimate version of Google. The ultimate search engine that would understand everything on the Web. It would understand exactly what you wanted, and it would give you the right thing. We're nowhere near doing that now. However, we can get incrementally closer to that, and that is basically what we work on.

Normally, people believe that, if they hear just words, that these words must lead to some thought.

Information is just signs and numbers, while knowledge involves their meaning. What we want is knowledge, but what we get is information.

As children we hoard and gloat over words. Words give ownership: we name our world and we claim it...Children trust the power of words.

If language did not affect behavior, it could have no meaning.

Experience teaches us that thought does not express itself in words, but rather realizes itself in them

Our words are, as a general rule, filled by the people to whom we address them with a meaning which those people derive from their own substance, a meaning widely different from that which we had put into the same words when we uttered them.

The finest words in the world are only vain sounds if you can't understand them. The best sentence? The shortest.

I loved the sound of the words, even if I was not entirely sure what all of them meant.

We are taught words, not ideas.

[Language is] really a pretty amazing invention if you think about it. Here I have a very complicated, messy, confused idea in my head. I'm sitting here making grunting sounds and hopefully constructing a similar messy, confused idea in your head that bears some analogy to it.

Although I'm not prepared to move up my prediction of a computer passing the Turing test by 2029, the progress that has been achieved in systems like Watson should give anyone substantial confidence that the advent of Turing-level AI is close at hand. If one were to create a version of Watson that was optimized for the Turing test, it would probably come pretty close.

Language is the house of the truth of Being.

We use words to understand each other and even, sometimes, to find each other.

One of our big goals in search is to make search that really understands exactly what you want, understands everything in the world. As computer scientists, we call that artificial intelligence.

What do we mean by "knowledge" or "understanding"? And how do billions of neurons achieve them? These are complete mysteries. Admittedly, cognitive neuroscientists are still very vague about the exact meaning of words like "understand," "think," and indeed the word "meaning" itself.

I once used the word OBSOLETE in a headline, only to discover that 43 per cent of housewives had no idea what it meant. In another headline, I used the word INEFFABLE, only to discover that I didn't know what it meant myself.

The problem with Google is you have 360 degrees of omnidirectional information on a linear basis, but the algorithms for irony and ambiguity are not there. And those are the algorithms of wisdom.

These glorious things-words-are man's right alone...Without words we should know no more of each other's hearts and thoughts than the dog knows of his fellow dog....for, if you will consider, you always think to yourself in words, though you do not speak them aloud; and without them all our thoughts would be mere blind longings, feelings which we could not understand ourselves.

What lives in words is what words were needed to learn.

Be respectful of words. They mean something.