A Simple AI Capable of Basic Reading Comprehension

As other have mentioned, you will make progress more efficiently if you survey the linguistics literature, where a tremendous number of very smart people have spent decades grappling with the same essential problems.

Heterodox linguistics is a veritable goldmine of ideas that can be implemented in AI. My favorite approach is Richard Hudson's "word grammar," which you can read about here: http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/wg.htm

Word grammar is particularly well suited for coding, because it strips away lots of arbitrary linguistic formalisms in favor of a flexible, network-centric framework. Some of the core principles, like default inheritance, were actually taken directly from computer science.

I would argue that my program can understand the relationship between different objects but I agree that it does not understand the meaning of the relationships.

> I couldn't answer a REAL reading-comprehension test about this: I just have no idea what it's REALLY talking about, I don't actually understand it. (Obviously on a syntactic level, it's not hard to parse.) I don't know what over-expression is, I don't know what a kinase is, I don't know what phosphorylation is. I don't understand the text. But if the questions are simple, perhaps I could answer some reading comprehension questions about this by parroting back quotations from it. Syntactically, there's nothing difficult here. I just don't understand it.

I would also argue that you are doing very basic reading comprehension here. You might not know the meaning of individual objects, but you understand that "what is wrong" is "the overlapping substrate specificities of many AGC kinases, it is likely that the over-expression of one member of this kinase subfamily will result in the phosphorylation of substrates that are normally phosphorylated by another AGC kinase". You might not know what that whole phrase means, but you understand that its related to "whats wrong" with "studying the physiological role of AGC kinases by overexpressing the active forms in cells". I agree that my program is unable to do full comprehension in not understanding the meaning of objects and relationships, but it can do very basic comprehension in understanding what the relationships are.

> So I think it's unfair to call sentence parsing real reading comprehension, even if sometimes reading comprehension tests fail to differentiate between the two. You can parse sentences perfectly while understanding nothing.

I did not really call it "real" reading comprehension, but "basic" reading comprehension. But I suppose "basic reading comprehension" is still a little of a stretch. I think the real question here is: how can you really determine if a program can understand something? What does understanding something really mean? It is difficult to define something like this and it seems we need some kind of "Turing test" for understanding.

> I did find your work very interesting, thank you.

Thanks!

Professional writers, editors, and teachers of language would be perfectly fine with those sentences, because they understand language as being made up of syntax AND semantics.