"A six-month-old baby has more creative capacity than a supercomputer". Mark Turner, Full Professor of Western Reserve University (USA), considered at the University of Navarra that "artificial intelligence is many years away" from being able to imitate the communication, creativity and learning capabilities of human beings.

Turner, one of the world's leading cognitive linguists, visited the campus in Pamplona on the occasion of an international congress organized by the project 'Public discourse' of the Institute for Culture and Society (ICS) with the degree scroll 'Mind, Meaning and MultimodalityMind,Meaning and Multimodality.

data The expert stressed that the "extraordinary creative capacity" of people, which he explains through their ability to integrate diverse concepts in different circumstances (advanced blending), generates a number of possible combinations that neither current machines nor those of the future will be able to process and imitate in many years. In this line, he stressed that "the unconscious is complex to explain and even more difficult to be imitated by artificial intelligence".

knowledgeProfessor Turner's research focuses on the mental operations that make it possible for humans today to be so "astonishingly creative as a species" and to have a "remarkable higher-order cognition". In particular, his study places special emphasis on modern cognitive abilities for conceptual mapping and integration.

Library Services International TV NewsScape

The American scientist is director founder of the network Cognitive Science and co-director of the laboratory network Hen Lab, an international consortium for the study of the large data of multimodal communication (speech, gestures, expressions, interaction, etc.), in which ICS also participates.

One of its initiatives is the Library Services International NewsScape of Television News, a gigantic corpus of spoken language, which makes it possible to study all multimodal aspects of television news (gesture, prosody, images and sounds accompanying speech, television production effects, etc.).

It currently contains more than 250,000 hours of television news in English, Spanish and other European languages. With respect to the news collection at Spanish, despite being in an initial phase, it is currently the largest existing resource for the study of spoken Spanish, with some 6,000 hours of television and some 40 million words of synchronized subtitles.

The goal of the ICS congress in which Mark Turner participated was to explore and promote interdisciplinary methods for thinking about language uses and to foster discussion among researchers working in the fields of multimodality and expression from different perspectives: pragmatics, semantics, computer science, cognitive science, analysis of speech, semiotics, computational linguistics, etc. The programs of study of multimodality are increasingly relevant to understanding the human mind, as they influence the way we conceive cognition.