FROM CHINESE ROOMS TO IRISH ROOMS - NEW WORDS ON VISIONS FOR LANGUAGE

Natural languages like English have been constrained in expressing per ceptions like vision, sound and touch for years despite the efforts of Joyce (1922, 1939) and others. In situ, lexicons have been limited in their form and content. They have typically been structured in the fo rm of sequences of natural language words with their content defined u sing flat symbolic descriptions in natural languages. In particular, w e believe that today's dictionaries in general, and with respect to Ar tificial Intelligence (AI) systems in particular, are unnatural in the sense that they do not encode pictures for words just like we do in o ur heads. There is now a move towards integrated systems in Artificial Intelligence (AI) (see Dennett 1991; Me Kevitt 1994a, 1994b) and that will cause a need for dire actions on lexical research in the form of integrated lexicons. We believe that lexicons must move towards a sit uation where natural language words are also defined in terms of spati al and visual structures. These spatial and visual structures will sol ve what have been two of the most prominent problems in the field of N atural Language Processing (NLP) for years: (1) Where are symbolic sem antic primitive meanings in computer programs grounded? and (2) how co me some words, typically in the defining vocabulary, in dictionaries h ave circular definitions so that words end up defining each other? We believe integrated lexicons will cause these two problems to go away a nd hence help solve Searle's Chinese Room Problem and move more toward s Irish Rooms of people like James Joyce.