What Would Hofstadter Say?

Reading Daniela Hernandez's Wired piece, "These Guys Are Teaching Computers How to Think Like People" shortly after James Somers' "The Man Who Would Teach Machines to Think" makes me wonder what Douglas Hofstadter would have to say about Stanford University's Neural Analysis of Sentiment (NaSent).

As Hernandez reports, NaSent seems to think in a way other big data initiatives don't. "NaSent is part of a movement in computer science known as deep learning, a new field that seeks to build programs that can process data in much the same way the brain does," she says.

Unlike other sentiment detecting program that only rate a sentences positivity or negativity based on the positivity and negativity of words in the sentence, NaSent evaluates each word's status based on context. "NaSent is different," Hernandez explains. "It can identify changes in the polarity of each word as it interacts with other words around it."

Does this mean that NaSent would be closer to the kind of artificial intelligence Hofstadter seeks (as detailed in "The Man Who Would Teach Machines to Think")?