Why is AI so Confused by Language?

From the Elemental Blog, well worth reading through there:

Why is AI so confused by language? It’s all about mental models.  By David Ferrucci

In my last post, I shared some telling examples where computers failed to understand what they read. The errors they made were bizarre and fundamental. But why? Computers are clearly missing something, but can we more clearly pin down what?

Let’s examine one specific error that sheds some light on the situation. My team ran an experiment where we took the same first-grade story I discussed last time, but truncated the final sentence:

Fernando and Zoey go to a plant sale. They buy mint plants. They like the minty smell of the leaves.

Fernando puts his plant near a sunny window. Zoey puts her plant in her bedroom. Fernando’s plant looks green and healthy after a few days. But Zoey’s plant has some brown leaves.

“Your plant needs more light,” Fernando says.

Zoey moves her plant to a sunny window. Soon, ___________.

[adapted from ReadWorks.org]

Then we asked workers on Amazon Mechanical Turk to fill in the blank. Here’s what the workers suggested:

New Tries at Common Sense Reasoning

We saw it at the very beginning, common sense reasoning is the key part of creating the most useful and powerful kinds of AI. There have been many attempts to do this, we tested a number, but they did not past our tests.  The excerpt from a non technical article from Wired below describes the challenge.  Looking forward to see more.

Watson's Creator Wants to Teach AI a New Trick: Common Sense
David Ferrucci built a computer that mastered Jeopardy. Since then, he's been attacking a more challenging task.   .... '

Ferrucci and his company, Elemental Cognition,    hope to fix a huge blind spot in modern AI by teaching  machines to acquire and apply everyday knowledge that lets humans communicate, reason, and navigate our surroundings. We use common sense reasoning so often, and so easily, that we barely notice it.

Ernest Davis, a professor at NYU who has been studying the problem for decades, says common sense is essential for advancing everything from language understanding to robotics. It is “central to most of what we want to do with AI,” he says.  .... "

Also see Elemental's blog.