Our paper seeks to bridge the gap between a linguistic and a technological description of Artificial Intelligence, as we see chatbots and other representations pushing to the forefront of academic ways of working. We set out to venture a philologist’s perspective on AI, critically reflecting upon the extent and nature of a lexicographical software’s ‘intelligence.’ We shall discuss and demonstrate AI’s potentials and limitations by adhering to the specific case of the recently released English Dialect Dictionary Online 4.0 (Markus and team 2023). While we propose that EDD Online is ‘intelligent’ in the sense that its retrieval software will anticipate and be capable of answering many of the questions that dialectologists would raise, we claim that the reason for such ‘intelligence’ is inherently rooted within the competence of humans in terms of predicting such questions and of eliciting the answers by means of complex query rules. We shall in fact argue that – as opposed to retrieval software types like the hotly debated ChatGPT chatbot, which are merely black box phenomena – EDD Online 4.0’s user interface represents a rare feature of AI: transparency and proactive user-friendliness. (185 words)

中文翻译：

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语言学家对人工智能的看法——以英语方言在线词典4.0为例

我们的论文旨在弥合人工智能的语言和技术描述之间的差距，因为我们看到聊天机器人和其他表现形式正在推向学术工作方式的最前沿。我们开始尝试从语言学家的角度看待人工智能，批判性地反思词典编纂软件“智能”的程度和本质。我们将结合最近发布的英语方言在线词典 4.0（Markus 和团队 2023）的具体案例来讨论和展示人工智能的潜力和局限性。虽然我们认为 EDD Online 是“智能”的，因为它的检索软件将预测并能够回答方言学家提出的许多问题，但我们声称这种“智能”的原因本质上植根于方言学家的能力范围内。人类通过复杂的查询规则来预测此类问题并得出答案。事实上，我们认为，与像备受争议的 ChatGPT 聊天机器人这样的检索软件类型相比，EDD Online 4.0 的用户界面只是黑匣子现象，它代表了人工智能的一个罕见特征：透明度和主动的用户友好性。 （185字）