Since at least the Middle Ages, philosophers and philologists have dreamed of curing naturallanguages of their flaws by constructing entirely new idioms according to orderly, logical principles.
He imagined that Ithkuil might be able to do what Lakoff and Johnson said naturallanguages could not: force its speakers to precisely identify what they mean to say.
And in addition to learning about why lying is good, or why kids have a natural propensity to learn foreign languages, or whether chimps can talk, business executives are taking greater pains to communicate the right impression to customers in a tech-driven world where word-of-mouth can spread like wildfire to affect brand images.
One challenge is improving the algorithms of natural language processing by adapting to the specialist languages area such as medicine and finance, where Watson is learning to work.