I seem to see the shadow of natural language processing in the alien language constructed in the movie "Arrival". It is not surprising that the author himself has a background in computer science.
The fundamental purpose of natural language processing is to allow computers to understand human language. Computer learning human language is the same as human learning language. It starts with a single vocabulary and can understand the meaning of the sentence after slowly accumulating it; then, can it understand the meaning of the context. For example, I made a dish of shredded fish-flavored pork today, took a photo and posted it to Moments with this text:
"I fried fish-flavored shredded pork for Lao Li."
The underlying meaning of this sentence is, please give me a thumbs up. Hand it over to the computer to read it, and it will probably be broken down into a few words, "I", "Fried", "Fish-scented pork shreds", "Give", "Lao Li". An untrained computer does not know what these words mean when combined. Because using the same words, it can also be combined, such as "Lao Li fried fish-flavored pork shreds for me" or "Lao Li fried fish-flavored pork shreds for me" or "Lao Li, fried fish-flavored pork shreds for me" "Although these three combinations appear very rarely in practice. So when the computer read these words, it didn't think that I was cooking Lao Li, and of course it didn't understand the small abacus that wanted to be praised. Natural language processing is to change this situation. When we deal with these few words, we can limit some human language rules. For example, "I" appears in front of "yuxiang shredded pork" and "Lao Li", which means that the chef of fish-scented pork shreds is me, and Lao Li is Beneficiaries. In this way, the computer can make the next judgment according to the set rules, for example, to judge whether I want to like it. If the judgment is correct, the computer will understand what I mean.
Natural language processing is a very esoteric science. Part of the reason is that human language is too complex. It is a big project to let machines fully understand human language. Perhaps it is the writers who often let the characters fulfill their own wishes that cannot be fulfilled in real life in their works. For example, the ancient dragon looks ugly but the knights in the pen are all personable. Guess whether Ted Jiang also created an image of an alien who perfectly mastered natural language processing for himself in the original movie. The language of aliens in "Arrival" is non-linear, that is, they can communicate only through a single vocabulary, because they have mastered all the possible laws of language, and they are a perfect natural language processing system. Because aliens can grasp the meaning of sentences through vocabulary, and the context is also composed of sentences, so they understand the context after understanding the sentence, not only the context of the cross section but also the context of time, that is, they have the ability to understand the past and the present. .
Speaking of language, I have to say another movie that has a lot to do with language, "The Tower of Babel". Human beings want to ascend to the sky. God has created different languages, so that human beings cannot communicate smoothly, and they cannot gather together to build a tower of the sky. The Tongtian Pagoda here represents the self-destruction of mankind. Nowadays, human beings have studied hundreds of languages around the world, but contradictions still exist, self-destructive things are happening every day, it's just that everyone’s destruction together has become mutual killing. "The Tower of Babel" is a negative warning, and "Arrival" is a positive expectation. Although we have mastered many languages, we still cannot achieve the accuracy of translation. Sometimes it is accidental, and more often it is intentional. At this time, the appearance of alien creatures may represent a wish, hoping that there will be a language to transmit information between each race equally, and the misunderstandings are eliminated, and the human race can continue for a long time.
At the end of this article, only one meaning has been said. Another aspect of the movie is whether we will choose to continue if we foresee the future. This is foresight, rather than insight. When all the laws of the world have been cracked, there is nothing left to penetrate. In the end of "Arrival", it is not said what kind of "weapons" the alien creatures left to mankind. Is it this ability to penetrate a lifetime? From the example of the heroine, seeing what will happen in the future does not make human beings live actively. If human beings start to destroy themselves, it will not violate the original intention of alien life to come to the earth. Think about it again, if we really have the ability to penetrate life, our future may not be the future. It may also be the past. People still associate events with a fixed time because we have references. Our reference is the age of ourselves and those around us. Adults are getting old and children are growing up. This biological process is irreversible. After writing this, I suddenly thought of Fields Gerrard. Suddenly I felt that Fields Gerrard, like the heroine in the movie, had a conversation with a seven-legged beast, and he had penetrated the world's most complex natural language processing method, and wrote the reverse growth "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" , I searched Fields Gerrard Wikipedia and found that his name Scott came from his sister who died early, and her sister's name was Louis, the same as the heroine in "Arrival". This is how many events are connected together non-linearly.
If the law of growth can also be broken, then the past and the future will really be indistinguishable. When watching "Arrival", I feel that the film's explanation of how humans survive is a paradox. In this way, aliens are indeed smarter than us. Seeing the fate of their race to be extinct in the future, they took a positive action like visiting the earth. And many human beings like the male protagonist can't stick to their choice after seeing the tragedy result. If you look at the life of a person, the end is the same death, but we still have to live every day. A single life has an end, but human beings, a whole composed of billions of individual lives, still have no end. The discussion about the meaning of life has never stopped since ancient times. Mankind may be grateful for their inability to penetrate into the future, because they have expectations, and they have the motivation to live.
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