system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Understanding of language by a computer, couldn't we make it work through linguistics?

Let's first define understanding of language. For me, if a computer can take X number of sentences and group them by some sort of similarity in nature of those statements, that's a first step towards understanding. 

So my point is
-We understand a lot about the nature of sentence structure, and linguistics is pretty advanced in general.
-We have only a limited amount of words, and each of those words only has a limited amount of possible roles in any sentence.
- Each of those words will only have a limited amount of related words, synonyms (did vs made happen), or words that belong in same groups (strawberry, chocolate - dessert group)

So would it not be possible to write a program that will recognize the similarity between "I love skiing, but I always break my legs" and "Oral sex is great, but my girlfriend thinks it's only great on special occasions"?
gpt
There's a lot more to language that people realize. Assuming we're dealing with just text, parsing is only around 85% accuracy these days, maybe pushing 90%. Dealing with speech, etc. is far more complicated.

To make matters worse, there is no agreed-upon model of grammars -- there are a range of models some of which are really good at describing language but really hard to use for NLP, and others are really good for NLP but not very good for describing language.

Still further, the study of meaning (both literal and non-literal) is fairly new, and what we know is vastly eclipsed by what we don't know. Further, a lot of what we say is caught up in world knowledge (it's not a fact about *English* that dogs are mammals) and about our knowledge of human capacities (using turns of phrase, metaphor, allusion, etc. are done because we expect people can *figure out* what we're saying extra-linguistically).

Language -- strictly pure language itself -- doesn't cover nearly half of what you're aiming for. To get the rest, you need something bordering on artificial intelligence.