What would a Wittgensteinian computational linguistics be like

The paper tries to relate Wittgenstein’s later writings about language with the history and content of Artificial Intelligence (AI), and in particular, its sub-area normally called Computational Linguistics, or Natural Language Processing. It argues that the shift, since 1990, from rule-driven approaches to computational language and logic, associated with traditional AI and the linguistics of Chomsky, to more statistical models of language have made those connections more plausible, in particular because there is good reason to think the latter is a better model of use than the former. What statistical language models are not, of course, are immediately plausible models of meaning. Moreover, a statistical model seeking a model of a whole language, one can now look at the World Wide Web (WWW) as an encapsulation of the usage of a whole a language, open to computational exploration, and of a kind never before available. I describe a recent empirical effort to give sense to the notion of a model of a whole language derived from the web, but whose disadvantage is that that model could never be available to a language user because of the sheer size of the WWW. The problematic issue in such an analogy (Wittgenstein and NLP) is how one can go beyond the anti-rule aspect of both to some view of how concepts can even appear to exist, whatever their true status. “A main source of our failure to understand is that we do not command a clear view of the use of our words – our grammar is lacking in this sort of perspicuity. A perspicuous representation produces just that understanding which consists in “seeing connexions”. Hence the importance of finding and inventing intermediate cases. The concept of a perspicuous representation is of fundamental significance for us. It earmarks the form of account we give, the way we look at things.” Wittgenstein: Philosophical Investigations $122. (My emphasis) 1