"A six-month old baby is more creative than a supercomputer," or so Mark Turner, professor at Western Reserve University (USA), stated at the University of Navarra. He continued that we are still "many years away" from artificial intelligence being able to mimic human communication skills, creativity and learning.

Turner, one of the world's leading cognitive linguists, visited the Pamplona campus for an international conference on Mind, Meaning and Multimodality organized by the Public Discourse project within the Institute for Culture and Society (ICS).

The expert stressed that people's "extraordinary creative capacity," which he explained through their ability to integrate various concepts under different circumstances (advanced blending), generates a lot of data and possible combinations that neither current nor future machines will be able to process and imitate. In that vein, he stressed that "the unconscious is complex to explain and even harder to imitate with artificial intelligence."

Professor Turner's research focuses on the mental operations that enable humans to be so "astonishingly creative as a species" and to have "remarkable higher-order cognition." The study places particular emphasis on modern cognitive skills mapping and conceptual integration.

NewsScape International TV News Library

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

One of its initiatives is NewsScape International TV News Library, a huge corpus of spoken language, which allows one to study all multimodal aspects of television news (gesture, prosody, images and sounds that accompany speech, language, television production effects, etc.).

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

With Mark Turner's participation, this ICS conference aimed to explore and promote interdisciplinary approaches to reflect on the uses of language and stimulate debate among researchers working in the fields of multimodality and expression from different perspectives: pragmatics, semantics, computer science, cognitive science, discourse analysis, semiotics, computational linguistics, etc. Multimodality studies are increasingly relevant for understanding the human mind given that it influences ways of thinking about cognition.