Teaching natural language to computers

"Natural Language," whether spoken and attended to by humans, or processed and generated by computers, requires networked structures that reflect creative processes in semantic, syntactic, phonetic, linguistic, social, emotional, and cultural modules. Being able to produce novel and useful behavior following repeated practice gets to the root of both artificial intelligence and human language. This paper investigates the modalities involved in language-like applications that computers — and programmers — engage with, and aims to fine tune the questions we ask to better account for context, self-awareness, and embodiment.