Rob Freeman

I’m Rob Freeman, and Chaotic Language is an attempt to gather together different threads of more than 35 years of my research, both in formal and informal environments, into the nature of language and cognition.

That research began formally when I was working in Japan under the big AI 5th Generation Project of that time. And even earlier, lurking in Cambridge on the fringes of the British Alvey project, which was a response to that. But really began long before, with a passion to understand what it meant to think in the forms of another language.

The Web domain dates from 2003, when I followed a hunch that what I was looking at with my early cross-product combination of word vector work (the first exploration of this in the world? https://patents.google.com/patent/US7392174B2/en ), would turn out to generate chaos. So chaos would prove key to unravelling the puzzles of language and cognition.

My boss at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in Hong Kong in 1994 asked me how long it would be before computers were able to handle human language. I said at that time, about 10 years after we start addressing the problem properly using distributed representation. He was shocked that it might take so long. Now 30 years ago. But it has proven quite prescient if you date treating language properly using distributed representation from the explosion of neural networks into the mainstream around 2011.

But I think we’re still not quite there yet. There is a trick about distributed representation that we are still missing. I hope the gap will be closed at last, soon. This website attempts to inform in service of that goal.

Contact

For questions or collaboration opportunities feel free to email admin-at-chaoticlanguage.com