What does the (distant) future of language acquisition look like?

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Re: What does the (distant) future of language acquisition look like?

Postby tungemål » Sun Apr 11, 2021 1:26 pm

I'm always wondering about this when writing e-mails in English. I have received "with best regards" from a sender in the UK. American e-mails seem to use "cheers". So what's the norm for formal e-mails? A formal e-mail is on par with a letter.

Le Baron wrote:I don't think I have ever written or received 'best regards' at the end of an email or a real letter. Who actually says 'best regards' and why? It was never standard English in the UK.

'Kind regards' (which I've actually received a few times) is another which seems to have a vague meaning to me. Do they mean 'best wishes'? Even that I reserve that for actual best wishes like a birthday or at a push to someone I know more informally. 'Regards' seemed to turn up when I was first using e-mail in the late 1990s and (in the UK at least) it collapsed into 'cheers' on the informality scale.

I get the feeling people don't really know how to sign off in an email because it's in a no man's land between a letter and 'chat'. :lol:
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Re: What does the (distant) future of language acquisition look like?

Postby Le Baron » Sun Apr 11, 2021 1:45 pm

'Yours sincerely' or 'sincerely' for people you know or are familiar with. 'Yours faithfully' when you're addressing someone for the first time/you don't really know them/you're writing a one-off formal letter.

'Yours truly' if you're Jack the Ripper.
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Re: What does the (distant) future of language acquisition look like?

Postby Caromarlyse » Sun Apr 11, 2021 1:57 pm

tungemål wrote:I'm always wondering about this when writing e-mails in English. I have received "with best regards" from a sender in the UK. American e-mails seem to use "cheers". So what's the norm for formal e-mails? A formal e-mail is on par with a letter.

Le Baron wrote:I don't think I have ever written or received 'best regards' at the end of an email or a real letter. Who actually says 'best regards' and why? It was never standard English in the UK.

'Kind regards' (which I've actually received a few times) is another which seems to have a vague meaning to me. Do they mean 'best wishes'? Even that I reserve that for actual best wishes like a birthday or at a push to someone I know more informally. 'Regards' seemed to turn up when I was first using e-mail in the late 1990s and (in the UK at least) it collapsed into 'cheers' on the informality scale.

I get the feeling people don't really know how to sign off in an email because it's in a no man's land between a letter and 'chat'. :lol:


From my experience working in London, I'd say "kind regards" is most common, followed by "best regards" (some people make the latter their "thing"). Internally within the same team/company, or if you're working a lot with someone, the sign-off often becomes either "thanks" or "KR" or just a name (or the first initial). Though some people use "kind regards" all the time, even with people they frequently work with. Some people put the "kind regards" or alternative in with their auto-signature, so you end up with it all the time by default. If I'm sending something by email to someone I have to be very formal towards, I use the letter etiquette, i.e. would use "Dear XXX", "Yours sincerely". I find it's better to err on the side of being overly polite than not. I also find I have to adapt to whatever is the "local" etiquette of whichever new place I'm working in.
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Re: What does the (distant) future of language acquisition look like?

Postby tungemål » Sun Apr 11, 2021 2:04 pm

To the opening post...

I'll try to speculate. I think it's already impressive how far AI has come, and it will continue to improve. Will there be a need for a teacher? Yes, I think so, because the human contact is important, but I imagine automatic systems like the one in the article will be able to do a lot: Probably it will be possible to converse with an AI system and do smalltalk like with a real human, and the system will note all grammar problems and be able to suggest the correct way to say it. So in fact everything that an Italki teacher does today.

We will still need to make the effort to learn a language. Will it be necessary? We already have systems that translate, that can understand spoken language, and that can speak. These systems will improve, so that translation between at least the big languages will be 99.9% accurate. However I think that people will still learn languages because it's not the same talking into an automatic translator.

EGP wrote:I don't dream about the terminator or similar scenarios very often. But occasionally I read something that makes me stop and consider.

With the massive advances that we can see in NLP (natural language processing) and AI today, is it far fetched that there will only ever be a need for a teacher for the most communicative/emotional/pragmatic dimensions of language use?

I was just reading this https://www.xjtlu.edu.cn/en/news/2021/0 ... ered-by-ai

and they have designed a speaking resource that helps your speaking. I doubt it is accurate since I have trialled some basic stuff before from Cambridge and it was quite stupid to tell me my English had some problems. However, the point is that with time, and the more data dumped into these machines. I believe they will get there with some types of activities.

Or will the time come that AI I won't even bother pretending to be a teacher robot sort of thing, because there might be no need since we already can just talk and have it all translated at like 'hello Siri' types of scenarios?

Now Siri or 'hello google' or whatever you are using is not that bad for some stuff. But I imagine if they give it another 100 years, and areas such as language acquisition get targeted we might see some crazy advances.

"Siri how do I say... in (this language) if I am trying to be polite ..." And then Siri knows I am a teenager and asks who I am asking.... queries me back "well are you asking a teenager out on a date or are you telling an adult you can't go to work...."

Just really dam specific with time and big data crunching!

RANT over.
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Re: What does the (distant) future of language acquisition look like?

Postby Le Baron » Sun Apr 11, 2021 3:47 pm

Caromarlyse wrote:From my experience working in London, I'd say "kind regards" is most common, followed by "best regards" (some people make the latter their "thing"). Internally within the same team/company, or if you're working a lot with someone, the sign-off often becomes either "thanks" or "KR" or just a name (or the first initial). Though some people use "kind regards" all the time, even with people they frequently work with. Some people put the "kind regards" or alternative in with their auto-signature, so you end up with it all the time by default. If I'm sending something by email to someone I have to be very formal towards, I use the letter etiquette, i.e. would use "Dear XXX", "Yours sincerely". I find it's better to err on the side of being overly polite than not. I also find I have to adapt to whatever is the "local" etiquette of whichever new place I'm working in.


'Kind regards' is a 21st century internet development. 'Kind regards' was unheard of when I was growing up in the UK. Maybe it was already a thing in the U.S.
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Re: What does the (distant) future of language acquisition look like?

Postby rdearman » Sun Apr 11, 2021 4:01 pm

I have always signed emails with "Regards" since about 1995 in the UK. It is useful to note how close the T is to the G on most keyboards and be very careful if you want to avoid an incident I once had at work when sending an "all staff" email.
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Re: What does the (distant) future of language acquisition look like?

Postby Le Baron » Sun Apr 11, 2021 9:43 pm

Freudian slip.
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Re: What does the (distant) future of language acquisition look like?

Postby EGP » Mon Apr 12, 2021 10:45 am

'retards'
:lol: :lol: :lol: :lol:

Here's my tip on how to choose the ending (except the above error), just copy the way they ended it. If my boss finishes with something, I use the same. And that also goes with the intro.

Parrots

I have trouble believing that AI can get near human-like communication. One reason is that there are just too many senses of language structures. Another is that the machine does not have a human body. As in our body is an extension of our senses. We communicate with more than words. We also have things like satire. We use persuasion for reasons etc.

I do believe AI will be great for certain scenarios though.
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Re: What does the (distant) future of language acquisition look like?

Postby Le Baron » Mon Apr 12, 2021 12:57 pm

In general the bigger problem with AI is not what it can or can't do in a theoretical or practical sense, but the fact of its implementation regardless of whether it is entirely suited to the job it is being given. Notoriously language is not straightforward message delivery and is prone to misinterpretation. This is one of the great problems of communication theory, which also includes analysis of how and why persuasion works (in e.g. advertising) and how literature and theatre is able to draw us in despite us knowing that it is not reality.

I remember listening to a debate on BBC Radio 4 where a proponent was in support of AI implementation in areas such as decision making for legal cases and applications of all sorts for government services. His position was that the cool, analytical AI would only consider the facts and argument by analysing the language, whereas a person would be swayed by 'emotional prejudices.' In my opinion it takes some level of naivety to consider this a progressive step.
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Re: What does the (distant) future of language acquisition look like?

Postby Iversen » Mon Apr 12, 2021 3:02 pm

I once wrote a whole thread about ways Google translate could be improved. GT is a system where the software learns by comparing translations, not by being told by linguists what to do, and that already is a large step towards AI. So when one of its problems is that it has holes in its vocabulary the correct way to cure it would be to feed it a dictionary or two and tell it to treat the translations in the dictionary as translations everywhere else.

Another problem is its shaky understanding of grammar, and that's not as easy to cure. I have a suspicion that some human being already has introduced some rules of thumb into the system to solve isolated problems. For instance I once noted that a certain word order rule in Irish (versus English) apparently was implemented more succesfully in one direction than in the other, and that might indicate a limited clandestine human intervention. But to solve grammatical problems you would probably need to introduce some kind of grammatical markers. The system already now performs some simple transformations, and often succesfully, but when it muddles up something it does so on an epic scale. It might help if it knew more about the words it juggles around. In particular it should be told not to drop negations - they are there for a reason.

And the third step - which would even more complicated - would be to add an AI component to judge whether the resultant translations made any sense. There is already some information to be gained from the texts the software analyses, like for instance that ceilings normally are mentioned in connection with houses, but sometimes also in economics where there is scale of some kind involved. In a situation where there might be two different interpretations it should be better at choosing the most relevant one.

You don't expect a translation program to be creative and produce its own content (though this happens when the software goes totally astray - but that's not what we want). The fourth level of problem treatment would be to invent something intelligent to say, based on the accumulated knowledge about the world plus a randomizer that combines things in unexpected ways. And then evaluate the result to see whether it makes sense in a certain situation. I wouldn't be surprised to see this happen within my lifetime - but maybe not at a level where a human native speaker would be consistently fooled in the long run (the famous Turing test).
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