I'm currently working on a system for understanding natural language and you might be surprised by how many assumptions one must make in order to understand just this simple sentence. The only part of this sentence that nearly all humans could understand is the concept of growing up. Everything else would have to be inferred inductively from our personal expectations and experiences. For example, from this sentence, you wouldn't know the gender, race, or even species of Jane except from your experiences of people saying similar things about people about of whom you already knew the race, gender or species.
Consider the difficulty of modeling that sentence in a computer system. If all you had were examples of texts to go by, such as the scenario in the grandparent, how would you determine that Jane was a female? Within that vast body of text, somewhere, it has to contain the statement that "Jane" is a female name. Or Jane can only appear in sentences as the referent of a feminine pronoun, like "she" or "her". Or in that vast database of images and video, all human beings that were identified as Jane have to have female characteristics.
From an even deeper philosophical perspective, how do you know which Jane this is referring to? Is this Jane supposed to be an actual person with hidden but unknown state (such as the name of her parents) or is this a purely fictional creation, for whom it would be meaningless to ask who her parents were? How do you teach a computer the concept of a fictional character? The interesting about fictional characters that they do not describe what something is, but instead, describe what something is not. In order to create a computer that could pass the Turing test, the computer would have to be capable of modeling both fictional and concrete things at a minimum. It would have to know when someone was talking about something fictional or something that is supposed to represent an actual object. If we do not destroy ourselves first, the day will come when computers will be able to make this distinction, but I think the design of such a computer will have to be evolved rather than architected from the top down. I think the problem is just too hard.
I'm currently working on a system for understanding natural language and you might be surprised by how many assumptions one must make in order to understand just this simple sentence. The only part of this sentence that nearly all humans could understand is the concept of growing up. Everything else would have to be inferred inductively from our personal expectations and experiences. For example, from this sentence, you wouldn't know the gender, race, or even species of Jane except from your experiences of people saying similar things about people about of whom you already knew the race, gender or species.
Consider the difficulty of modeling that sentence in a computer system. If all you had were examples of texts to go by, such as the scenario in the grandparent, how would you determine that Jane was a female? Within that vast body of text, somewhere, it has to contain the statement that "Jane" is a female name. Or Jane can only appear in sentences as the referent of a feminine pronoun, like "she" or "her". Or in that vast database of images and video, all human beings that were identified as Jane have to have female characteristics.
From an even deeper philosophical perspective, how do you know which Jane this is referring to? Is this Jane supposed to be an actual person with hidden but unknown state (such as the name of her parents) or is this a purely fictional creation, for whom it would be meaningless to ask who her parents were? How do you teach a computer the concept of a fictional character? The interesting about fictional characters that they do not describe what something is, but instead, describe what something is not. In order to create a computer that could pass the Turing test, the computer would have to be capable of modeling both fictional and concrete things at a minimum. It would have to know when someone was talking about something fictional or something that is supposed to represent an actual object. If we do not destroy ourselves first, the day will come when computers will be able to make this distinction, but I think the design of such a computer will have to be evolved rather than architected from the top down. I think the problem is just too hard.