Why co-occurrence information alone is not sufficient to answer subcognitive questions
Turney (2001) claims that a simple program, PMI-IR, that searches the World Wide Web for co-occurrences of words in 350 million Web pages can be used to find human-like answers to the type of 'subcognitive' questions French (1990) claimed would invariably unmask computers (that had not lived life as we humans had) in a Turing Test. This paper shows that there are serious problems with Turney's claim. We show that PMI-IR does not work for even simple subcognitive questions. PMI-IR's failure is attributed to its inability to understand the relational and contextual attributes of the words/concepts in the queries. Finally, it is shown that, even if PMI-IR were able to answer many subcognitive questions, a clever interrogator in the Turing Test would still be able to unmask the computer.
Keywords: CO-OCCURRENCE EMERGENCE; CONTEXT; LARGE CORPORA; SUBCOGNITION; SUBCOGNITIVE QUESTIONS; TURING TEST
Document Type: Research Article
Publication date: 01 October 2001
- Editorial Board
- Information for Authors
- Subscribe to this Title
- Ingenta Connect is not responsible for the content or availability of external websites
- Access Key
- Free content
- Partial Free content
- New content
- Open access content
- Partial Open access content
- Subscribed content
- Partial Subscribed content
- Free trial content