I don't want to be updating language .....dynamic means dynamic.... pump it up!

First and foremost, language is defined by humans and used by humans. That means if "cat cat cat" means something to someone like “get me a sandwich” then that's what it means. We are not here to characterize what people think and say how they think or should understand. Natural language processing means natural, whatever people “say” it is, not the Queen's English.

For instance, for the volume, we would expect when something is playing on a speaker the user saying “pump it up" should mean to turn up the volume a lot, because that's what most people would think. Obviously there are many ways to say things and we don't know all of them nor do we want to.  Our users do either individually or in the aggregate know, and we want them to be able to update the language model by themselves.

In designing our product and working with Alexa skills, we want to make it so that people can add other ways of saying how to do a certain function. Whether the scope of this new word/phrase meaning is personal and not shared or made public does not matter.  We want people to say “define language”, “pump it up”,  “volume to maximum”.  I know this seems simplistic and languages are more complicated, but the functions (like volume) available in our product and most products like this are fairly minimal.  There are only so many things our product can do.

Most of the programming mechanisms for defining how to say things for a topic are a list of sentences you may say.  Amazon Lex/Alexa do this as an example sentences definitions for an intent.  This dynamic language method I'm proposing is intended to enable individuals to use the product and to adjust the language. It also can be just for fun, as a personal non-public language.  A person or family may have their phrases to turn up the volume, which is not seen by others, but they can affect changes to their product. “Cat cat cat” could mean turn up the volume, why? Because they feel like it.  Like with other public information such as definitions as mentioned in previous posts there will need to be some level of policing by the community to ensure the language modifications are reasonable.  We're not worried about that, like Wikipedia that will be worked out.

It’s exciting to enlist everyone in evolving the language dynamically !!