Humans vs. Machines in Understanding Language

Speakers:
Prof Sophie Scott (UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience) vs. Dr. Christos Christodoulopoulos (Amazon Alexa)

Topics to be discussed:

• Can a machine solving a problem (e.g. learning/understanding language) one way tell us anything about how humans might solve the same problem?
• Infant vs. machine language acquisition - an extension of the innate vs. ‘blank slate’ debate?
• Retrieving lexical identity of a word - by human vs. machine
• Affective computing - should machines detect affect in human voices? Should computers attempt to produce emotional speech?
• Vector models of Natural Language Processing vs. Word Net models in Psycholinguistics
• Does the machine need to be embodied and placed in a social setting (like a human) to learn a language?