Re:Natural Language Processing and the human brain
by beering on Tuesday December 25, 2012 @12:59PM
(#4966534)
I think this is quite similar to Moravec's paradox, where tasks that are "natural" to the brain are the most difficult to simulate on a computer, seemingly difficult tasks are easier on a computer. It makes sense if you consider that the mechanisms of each are fundamentally different, and each exploits its own strengths.
Planning how long a project takes given data about similar projects could readily be done on a computer (e.g. case-based reasoning or other machine learning). Having seen how bad many people are at planning, there's a good chance a computer could do just as well as an average human.
1) Kahneman's model is probably too high level to apply to solving NLP problems. It's an interesting abstraction, not a road map to human reasoning.
2) System 2 is Effortful Reasoning, not just doing math. For example, if you were engaging system 2 to plan how long a project was going to take system 2 would think about what kind of questions were relevant to generating an answer (how long have similar projects taken, are there any differences between this project and the others, etc.) and then think about how to combine these to produce an answer. Computers do not perform this kind of reasoning well at all.