I was think about AIs and how they would work, when I realised that I couldn't think of a way that an AI could be taught language. A child tends to learn language through associations of language and pictures to an object (e.g: people saying the word dog while around a dog, and later realising that  people say a dog and a car and learn what a means...). However, a text based AI couldn't use this method to learn, as they wouldn't have access to any sort of input device.The only way I could come up with is programming in every word, and rule, in the English language (or whatever language it is meant to 'speak' in), however that would, potentially, take years to do.Does anyone have any ideas on how this could be done? Or if it has been done already, if so how?Thanks in advance for any ideas.Btw: in this context, I am using AI to mean an Artificial Intelligence system with near-human intelligence, and no prior knowledge of language.
How would an AI learn language?
natural language
The general research area is known as 'grammar induction'.It is generally framed as a 'supervised learning' problem, with the input presented as raw text, and the desired output the corresponding parse tree.The training set often consists of both positive and negative examples.Naturally, there is no 'single best' method for achieving this, but some of the techniques that have been used to date include:Bayesian approachesGenetic AlgorithmsGenetic ProgrammingBlackboard ArchitecturesThe UpWrite Predictor