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December 31, 2003: Japan
develops robot that can translate English, Japanese. Press Trust of
India / available from the Hindustan Times. "Japan's NEC Corp has
succeeded in developing the world's first interactive robot capable of
translating Japanese to English and vice versa. The robot, PaPeRo, has
a built-in voice-recognition system that can distinguish among the voices
of several thousand people and a regulatory system that identifies the
correct meaning of words despite differences in pronunciation, local daily
Yomiuri reported on Tuesday." December 29, 2003: Complex
system watches insiders - Stock exchanges, regulators hunt for illegal
trades. By Andrew Countryman. Chicago Tribune (no fee reg. req'd.) "In
today's stock market, detecting illegal insider trading is a complex business,
with elaborate surveillance techniques, artificial-intelligence programs--and
some old-fashioned detective work. ... Market officials are reluctant
to discuss details of their surveillance efforts publicly, so as not to
tip their hand. But they use sophisticated computer monitoring, cross-referencing
trades with thousands of company news announcements each day, looking
for any connections. A new system at the NASD, honored this year by the
American Association for Artificial Intelligence for its innovation, has
generated more than 180 cases referred to federal authorities in less
than two years." December 25, 2003: 'Get
Me Rewrite!' 'Hold On, I'll Pass You to the Computer.' By Anne Eisenberg.
The New York Times (no fee reg. req'd.). "In the famous sketch from
the TV show'Monty Python's Flying Circus,' the actor John Cleese had many
ways of saying a parrot was dead, among them, 'This parrot is no more,'
... Computers can't do nearly that well at paraphrasing. English sentences
with the same meaning take so many different forms that it has been difficult
to get computers to recognize paraphrases, much less produce them. Now,
using several methods, including statistical techniques borrowed from
gene analysis, two researchers have created a program that can automatically
generate paraphrases of English sentences. The program gathers text from
online news services on specific subjects, learns the characteristic patterns
of sentences in these groupings and then uses those patterns to create
new sentences that give equivalent information in different words. The
researchers, Regina Barzilay, an assistant professor in the department
of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, and Lillian Lee, an associate professor of computer science
at Cornell University, said that while the program would not yield paraphrases
as zany as those in the Monty Python sketch, it is fairly adept at rewording
the flat cadences of news service prose. ... Such programs might even
be an aid to writers who want to adapt their prose to the background of
their readers. Dr. Lee said the researchers had thought about using it
'as a kind of 'style dial'' to rewrite documents automatically for different
groups - adapting articles on technical subjects for a children's encyclopedia,
for example. December 17/24, 2003: PDA
translates speech. By Kimberly Patch. Technology Research News. "As
speech recognition technology gets better, and as handheld computers get
more powerful, audio translators are becoming a more practical proposition.
Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University, Cepstral, LLC, Multimodal
Technologies Inc. and Mobile Technologies Inc. have put together a two-way
speech-to-speech system that translates medical information from Arabic
to English and English to Arabic and runs on an iPaq handheld computer.
... The effort is one of a series of projects aimed at providing the armed
forces with automatic translation for medical and force protection situations
and making automatic translation in a wider set of subject areas available
for tourists during the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, said [Alex] Waibel.
... The prototype also has a camera attachment that translates text like
that on street signs, said Waibel." December 13, 2003: Cracker
joke or two to win a £500 prize from Asda and be a laugh next year.
By David Williamson. The Western Mail / available from ic Wales. "One
of the reasons such groan-inducing favourites are still attracting interest
is that pioneers of artificial intelligence are teaching computers to
tell Q&A jokes. So far, computers have learned how puns work and how to
match them with nouns and verbs. Tests show that the jokes they have told
are almost as funny as those told by humans. And researchers at the University
of Edinburgh are hoping to create a 'language playground' where children
will be able to experiment with words. Graeme Ritchie said, 'We are aiming
it at children with disabilities becausethey are mainly deprived of the
thrusting swapping of jokes with their peer group.' In scientific studies
their Jape (Joke Analysis and Production Engine) system has amused children." December 11, 2003: AI
software interactive robot gets recognition. By Hazimin Sulaiman.
New Straits Times Computines (Malaysia). "A little while back, you
might have remembered Aini (www.ainibot.com) which stands for 'Artificial
Intelligent Neural-network Identity'. In an earlier article I wrote how
this AI software robot could be used as a Web site portal ambassador or
even downloaded onto the Pocket PC devices for educational applications.
... Well, Aini has finally made it into the Malaysia Book of Records,
Gold Edition, for 'her' success in being the first 'Malaysian Robotic
Interactive Program'. This is probably the recognition and push to spark
interest and inspiration in the local artificial intelligence field."
December 10, 2003: Meet
Stelarc, the face of artificial intelligence. By Garry Barker. The
Age. "The head is an interactive image about four metres high, projected
on to a screen in a darkened theatre. It peers down on visitors who sit
at a keyboard and type in questions. ... It is slightly eerie to be interacting
with a huge computer database of words, experience and software on the
edge of artificial intelligence. 'The head can do things I can't do -
it can rap, and I think the time will come when I will not be able to
be fully responsible for everything it might say,' says Stelarc, whose
single moniker has been his legal name for 30 years. ... So, this being
Melbourne, and Stelarc having grown up in Footscray, we asked the head
which footy team it supported. ..." December 3/10, 2003: Software
paraphrases sentences. By Kimberly Patch. Technology Research News.
"We paraphrase all the time, often without thinking about it. Try
to give a computer the means to reword a sentence, however, and it becomes
apparent that figuring out how to say it differently is complicated. Researchers
at Cornell University have tapped a pair of unlike sources -- on-line
journalism and computational biology -- to make it possible to automatically
paraphrase whole sentences. The researchers used gene comparison techniques
to identify word patterns from different news sources that described the
same event. The method could eventually allow computers to more easily
process natural language, produce paraphrases that could be used in machine
translation, and help people who have trouble reading certain types of
sentences." December 2003: The
Love Machine - Building computers that care. By David Diamond. Wired
Magazine. "I have seen the future of computing, and I'm pleased to
report it's all about ... me! This insight has been furnished with the
help of Tim Bickmore, a doctoral student at the MIT Media Lab. He's invited
me to participate in a study aimed at pushing the limits of human-computer
relations. What kinds of bonds can people form with their machines, Bickmore
wants to know. ... Bickmore's area of study is called affective computing.
Its proponents believe computers should be designed to recognize, express,
and influence emotion in users. Rosalind Picard, a genial MIT professor,
is the field's godmother; her 1997 book, Affective Computing, triggered
an explosion of interest in the emotional side of computers and their
users. ... And she developed an interest in the work of neuroscientist
Antonio Damasio. In his 1994 book, Descartes' Error , Damasio
argued that, thanks to the interplay of the brain's frontal lobe and limbic
systems, our ability to reason depends in part on our ability to feel
emotion. Too little, like too much, triggers bad decisions. The simplest
example: It's an emotion - fear - that governs your decision not to dive
into a pool of crocodiles." November 25, 2003: Robo-receptionist
clocks on - Android aide brings artificial intelligence to front desk.
By Helen R. Pilcher. Nature. "A cheeky, chatty robot has bagged a
job as university receptionist. From next week, the long-lashed lovely
will meet and greet guests of King's College London. Inkha - short for
'interactive neurotic King's head assembly' - will dole out directions
and events information. ... Driven by nine motors and a small laptop computer,
Inkha leans towards interesting people and shies away from sudden movements.
She chats when people are around and gets bored when there's nothing to
do." November 25, 2003: The
rise of the machines - Japan's leading the robotics charge, but to
where. By Tony McNicol. The Japan Times. "She's young, beautiful,
and fluent in several languages. Sakura Sanae, one of the newest entrants
to the Japanese diplomatic corps, and Tokyo's goodwill ambassador to the
ASEAN nations, is also entirely computer generated. ... While few other
countries could think of straight-facedly appointing a computer program
as a envoy, Japan has long had a soft-spot for a variety of pseudo-humans.
In past centuries, it might have been bunraku puppets and mechanical dolls.
Now, in the 21st century, it is computer-generated characters and humanoid
robots. Many Japanese companies have already started employing their own
friendly robots. ... While it may take decades to develop working humanoid
robots, humanoid entertainment robots could be walking around Japanese
homes in just a matter of years. ... [I]n recent years the Japanese government
has been providing generous funding for research into artificial intelligence
and humanoid robotics. Given the problems facing a shrinking and aging
Japanese society over the coming decades, researchers are also hoping
that humanoid robots could step into the missing workers' shoes?" November 24, 2003: The
Muse Is in the Software. By Teresa Riordan. The New York Times (no
fee reg. req'd.). "'Inventing is about catching the wave,' said Ray
Kurzweil, who addressed a national convention of inventors in Philadelphia
last Monday. 'Most inventions fail not because the inventor can't get
them to work but because the invention comes at the wrong time.' Mr. Kurzweil
should know. An inventor in the field of artificial intelligence, he has
started and sold several companies for millions of dollars. On Nov. 11,
Mr. Kurzweil and John Keklak, an engineer, received patent No. 6,647,395,
covering what Mr. Kurzweil calls a cybernetic poet. Essentially, it is
software that allows a computer to create poetry by imitating but not
plagiarizing the styles and vocabularies of human poets. ... Many of Mr.
Kurzweil's inventions, including the cybernetic poet, are based on pattern
recognition. 'The real power of human thinking is based on recognizing
patterns,' he said. The better computers get at pattern recognition, the
more humanlike they will become." November 23, 2003: I,
Robot - British mathematician Alan Turing predicted
that one day machines would think, and devised the Turing Test of artificial
intelligence. Fifty years on, are computers any smarter -- or just more
talkative? By Andrew Hodges. The Japan Times. "The man who devised
the Loebner Prize's scenario of a human conversing with a machine, back
in 1950 when computers barely existed, was also the man who first clearly
defined the roles of computer hardware and software. That man was Alan
Turing, who invented the computer in 1936. In that year he described the
idea of a universal machine, running any program placed on its input tape.
This became the principle of the stored-program digital computer, when
it was embodied in electronics after 1945. In 1950, Turing wrote a paper
on the idea of software simulating the mental operations of the brain
-- a paper that is now one of the most famous in scientific literature.
In it, Turing emphasized that to evince human intelligence, a program
must be capable of witty repartee. He also devised the game-show format
of competition with a human, with communication only through computer
terminals. What he called the 'Imitation Game' is now usually called the
'Turing Test.' ... More important than the exact form of the Turing Test
is the mathematician's assertion that intelligence could eventually be
passed by a computer program -- that Artificial Intelligence (or 'intelligent
machinery,' in his words) would be created." November 23, 2003: Talk
to her - Artificial intelligence vs. human stupidity. By Victoria
James. The Japan Times. "The earliest chatterbot programs ever written
say more about the human condition than they do about the nature of computer
intelligence. The first, ELIZA -- or Dr. Eliza, as 'she' was known --
had the persona of a Rogerian psychotherapist. Her successor, perhaps
the inspiration for Marvin, the 'paranoid android' of Douglas Adams' anarchic
'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' novels, was named PARRY and was
programmed to display the behavioral hallmarks of a paranoid schizophrenic.
... [Joseph] Weizenbaum recognized that Alan Turing's 'Imitation Game'
test of computer intelligence required merely that the computer simulate
intelligence, so he used some simple semantic tricks to create the desired
effect. (It's no coincidence that his program shares the name of Eliza
Doolittle, the erstwhile heroine of George Bernard Shaw's 'Pygmalion,'
a flower girl trained up to act like a lady in a perfect example of an
'imitation game.') ... In 1994, the term 'chatterbot' was established
in the AI lexicon by Michael Mauldin of Carnegie Mellon University, in
his account of entering the Loebner contest." November 21, 2003: Professor
selected to be Air Force adviser. November 19, 2003: Award
for new virtual TV guide. BBC. "The virtual guide is aimed at
helping visually impaired people Television could move into a new age
with a 'listening' virtual TV guide which can switch channels at the command
of the viewer. ... The software chats to viewers about what they want
to see, a computer linked to the TV uses voice recognition programmes
to accept their answer and then switches the set to the correct channel.
... Mark Wells, Televirtual's research director said: 'The talking programme
guide will be a great help to those people, often the elderly or those
with sight problems, who find ordinary guides and menu systems confusing
or difficult to read.'" November 17, 2003: Man,
machine fight to be king. Reuters / available from CNN. "Chess
great Garry Kasparov virtually shut down computer program "X3D Fritz"
to score a vital win in the third game of his latest man versus machine
match. ... German-built Fritz plays as well as a strong grandmaster, but
chess programs generally do not perform well in closed positions because
they cannot calculate ahead as clearly as they can in open, tactical battles.
... Kasparov is playing without physically moving pieces on a board. The
Azerbaijan-born grandmaster sits in front of a monitor wearing black 3-D
glasses that make the image of the board appear to float in front of him.
He announces his moves into a voice-recognition program." November 16, 2003: Teaching
computers how we sing - Even babies know how to separate speech from
song So why do the best of our computers find it so difficult? By Peter
Calamai. Toronto Star. "After all, as everyone realizes who has ever
phoned to check a credit card balance or get a new directory listing,
we're already using computerized speech recognition for simple daily tasks.
David Gerhard, a professor of computer science at the University of Regina,
says the speech-song distinction is important if we expect computers to
ever come close to standards of artificial intelligence that interact
smoothly with human beings and their surroundings, as regularly depicted
in science fiction movies. Computers programmed to recognize and analyze
the sung voice could have numerous practical applications -- speech therapy,
transcribing words and musical notes from a song, training singers, even
retrieving songs that fit your personal tastes from the immense and growing
online music collections." November 10, 2003: Artificial
intelligence and the smarter search engine. Sidebar / Future Watch
Column by Linda Rosencrance. Computerworld. "Within three to five
years, we could see a very different, next-generation search engine --
one that could extract specific facts, draw inferences and organize those
facts based on a few key words, says Tom Mitchell, former president of
the American Association of Artificial Intelligence in Menlo Park, Calif.
... Mitchell says what people are now able to do in the laboratory is
develop computer software that can, when given a Web page or Web site,
examine that page or site and find names of people, dates and locations.
'It can't read text and understand it in the level of detail people can,
but already it can read text and can say, 'Oh, this is the name of a person'
with about 95% accuracy and, 'Oh, this is a location; this is a date,''
he says. ... '[W]ith the next-generation search engine, you're going to
be able to ask a specific question.' The user will be able to do that
because of technology that's under development that partially allows a
computer to read -- in a sense that it's able to extract specific facts
and draw inferences from those facts and then present them, according
to Mitchell." November 8, 2003: Talk
the talk. By Nicole Manktelow. The Sydney Morning Herald. "A
raised eyebrow. A whispered answer. A subtle conversation for two takes
on new meaning when one of the participants is a mere machine. Meet InCA
(Internet Conversational Agent), a pocket-sized helper who recognises
natural language and talks back - incorporating some familiar gestures,
too. Talking machines have long been a staple of sci-fi, but Sydney researchers
have used today's off-the-shelf products to convert an ordinary PDA from
a gadget to an assistant that listens and responds. ... [Dr Waleed] Kadous
built the prototype over nine months with Professor Claude Sammut. Both
are from the University of NSW and are exploring how humans and computers
can communicate more naturally. ... CRC scientists are also exploring
the use of gestures and, amazingly, emotions. This means 'using a camera
to detect if you are smiling or frowning', says Kadous. 'If the system
detects you are frustrated it might change the way it suggests something
to you.'" November 2003: Baffling
the Bots - Anti-spammers take on automatons posing as humans. By Lee
Bruno. Scientific American. "Bots are well known for helping to generate
millions of spam messages advertising printer cartridges, septic systems,
Viagra and Nigerian money scams. ... During the fall of 2000 [Henry] Baird
conducted a trial at the University of California at Berkeley. The resulting
paper dealt with a new image-degradation model named Pessimal Print. Concurrently,
Yahoo and [Manuel] Blum and his team at Carnegie Mellon were working on
a similar model, one version of which is called EZ-Gimpy. It is a kind
of reverse Turing test, which has come to be known as a CAPTCHA, or 'completely
automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart.' These
Turing tests for Internet bots are a cognitive puzzle that can be solved
by humans but not by computers. ... EZ-Gimpy has worked well, but next-generation
bots are getting wise to it. They are getting better at recognizing the
distorted words contained in the dictionary. But Baird, along with Monica
Chew of Berkeley, co-developed BaffleText, a new CAPTCHA scheme that goes
beyond the 850-word dictionary of EZ-Gimpy. ... BaffleText incorporates
nonsense words to overcome the problem of a small dictionary. Also, it
leverages Gestalt psychology, or a human's innate ability to infer the
whole picture of an image from only partial information (something machines
can't do)." October 28, 2003: £40m
computer vision adds up to 7500 jobs. By Fiona MacGregor. Edinburgh
Evening News. "A new £40 million hi-tech centre at a city university
is set to create more than 7500 jobs in the Capital within 15 years. Plans
for Silicon Power House, a facility which will bring together expertise
in communications and computer technology, have been unveiled by Edinburgh
University. ... The new centre, scheduled for completion by 2007, is seen
as evidence of Edinburgh University's leading role within Europe in the
new science of informatics, which includes computer science, artificial
intelligence and cognitive science. Professor Michael Fourman, head of
the university's school of informatics, said: 'As computers develop, we
are more able to expand them in a way that adapts computers to respond
to people. To do that we need to under-stand more about how people respond
to things as well as how computers respond. One of the things people are
looking at is language which allows us to build machines that can speak
in a way that is more human, not just in terms of sound but also content.'" October 27: 2003: New
police cars have voice recognition. The Associated Press / available
from CNN. "A police officer sees a bank robbery suspect speed by
and says "pursuit." Automatically, the cruiser's blue lights, siren, flashing
headlights and video camera turn on. The car also sends a message to dispatch
giving the location and saying the officer is chasing someone. This voice-recognition
system is not a prototype -- it's on patrol in New Hampshire today, and
if the robbery scenario were to occur, officers could keep their hands
on the wheel and eyes on the road instead of fiddling with switches, buttons,
dials and microphones as they weave through traffic. It's called Project
54, after the 1960s police television comedy 'Car 54, Where Are You?,'
and its global positioning system even answers the show title's question." October 26, 2003: Drive
safely in a car with the gift of the gab. By Christina Stoke. Scotland
on Sunday. "A talking car capable of warning motorists if they are
driving badly or about to fall asleep at the wheel is being developed
by Scottish scientists. The vehicle uses the latest advances in voice
recognition and computerised speech to achieve levels of interaction between
car and driver previously only seen in action dramas such as the Knight
Rider television series and the James Bond film The World is Not Enough,
which featured a smooth-talking BMW. ... Dr Oliver Lemon, of the University
of Edinburgh's Human Communication Research Centre, is working with BMW
and Bosch on the vehicle. ... One of the greatest potential breakthroughs
the system offers is using analysis of the way the car is being driven
to give the motorist warning that an accident could be imminent. Lemon
said this can be achieved because the car will be able to analyse emotions
as well as voice commands." October 23, 2003: Human
possibilities. By Jim McClellan. The Guardian. "'Tell me a joke.'
A small audience sits in front of a big screen waiting for a response
to pop up. A short pause - then some type flickers up onscreen. 'Why did
the chicken cross the road?' A slight groan from the audience. A reply
is dutifully typed up. 'I don't know - why did the chicken cross the road?'
Another pause. Up on screen, more type appears. 'Because it was stapled
to the elephant.' Welcome to the Loebner prize contest, an annual attempt
to find the world's most 'human-seeming' chatbot. A chatbot is a program
designed imitate human conversation in text form. This year's event took
place at the University of Surrey. ... At the end of the afternoon, as
expected, the two humans came out top, though rather perplexingly, one
judge decided that both only rated one on a scale of five when it came
to seeming human. (The same judge gave all the bots one, as well.) The
chatbot that came next (and hence won) was Jabberwock, created by Juergen
Pirner, a German publisher of fantasy and science fiction. ... Organiser
Lynn Hamill, of Surrey University's Digital World Research Centre, says
she saw the contest as an amusing way of advancing the interests of the
Centre, which was set up to look at the way people and technologies interact.
'The Loebner prize is a useful way of getting people to think about these
things,' she says, adding that it may help AI research in general." October 20, 2003: German
chatty bot is 'most human'. By Jo Twist. BBC. "A German computer
program has chatted its way to first place in the Loebner Prize for human-like
communication. ... The event is based on the Turing Test, which suggests
computers could be seen as intelligent if their chat was indistinguishable
from those of humans. ... Jabberwock - not to be confused with Britain's
Jabberwacky - was named the 'most human' program, winning its German creator
Juergen Pirner the bronze medal." October 7, 2003: Meet
the PDA that can hold a conversation. By Helene Zampetakis. The Sydney
Morning Herald. "Amanda is the personal assistant of the future:
she is a good listener and quick at answering back. She reads email, checks
the news and weather, scans exchange rates and arranges appointments.
Ask her any question and she'll raise her eyebrows as she considers it
carefully, blink while she scans the internet for an answer, and deliver
her finding within seconds. ... Amanda's PDA [personal digital assistant],
developed by Dr Mohammed Waleed Kadous and Professor Claude Sammut, of
the University of NSW, is a prototype designed to blend mobile technology
with natural language to help humans interact more naturally with devices.
The natural language technology, known as inCA or 'internet conversation
agent', is also linked to tactile communication, so you can use a pen.
Eventually, it will be able to read emotions. ... Natural language technology
is much broader than speech recognition, which focuses on recognising
a specific range of words, because it seeks to convert words into meaning
by making contextual guesses much like the human brain." October 2, 2003: Software
robot for PDAs. By Hazimin Sulaiman. The New Straits Times (Malaysia).
"Aini, short for Artificial Intelligent Neural-network Identity (www.ainibot.com),
is a rather interesting approach to having a more human and personalised
interface between a computer and human. From the Web site, you get to
play with a demo based on a virtual Microsoft Pocket PC personal digital
assistant (PDA). ... According to [Professor Goh Ong Sing], Aini is an
artificial intelligence natural language chat robot, which means that
the engine allows people to communicate with computers in a more natural
form of language. This 'natural interface' uses a natural language processing
technology. The speech technology gives feedback or output via an 'Avatar'
or a character (whom you can choose to customise to your liking). 'Picture
it as having someone living and responding to you in your PC or PDA,'
Goh says. This sort of fires the imagination, especially if you like the
science-fiction movie scenes when computers respond to you via such interface.
The possibilities of 'human-friendly' technology are endless." September 24, 2003: Microsoft
Is Not Complacent About Innovation - Yes, it has followed others at
times. But it's one of the few companies now spending real money on research,
and the results are on the way. By David Kirkpatrick. Fortune. "It's
critical to understand the way these guys work, because they are among
the few still spending major amounts on research (about $6.9 billion in
the fiscal year that began in July). ... All the work on what Microsoft
calls 'natural user interface' emerged from Research, including elements
now in Word along with natural language translation techniques now undergoing
their first commercial implementation on Microsoft.com. All 130,000 articles
on the site are now automatically translated into Spanish by the company's
software. Japanese is in testing, with German and French on the way. In
addition to obvious uses for customers, Rashid says such technology can
save Microsoft hundreds of millions, since it is one of the world's largest
customers for language translation services." September 22, 2003: Chatbot
bids to fool humans - A computer program designed to talk like a human
is preparing for its biggest test in its bid to be truly "intelligent".
By Jo Twist. BBC. "Jabberwacky lives on a computer hard drive, tells
jokes, uses slang, sometimes swears and can be quite a confrontational
conversationalist. What sets this chatty AI (artificial intelligence)
chatbot apart from others is the more it natters, the more it learns.
The bot is the only UK finalist in this year's Loebner Prize and is hoping
to chat its way to a gold medal for its creator, Rollo Carpenter. The
Loebner Prize is the annual competition to find the computer with the
most convincing conversational skills and started in 1990. Jabberwacky
will join eight other international finalists in October, when they pit
their wits against flesh and blood judges to see if they can pass as one
of them. It is the ultimate Turing Test, which was designed by mathematician
Alan Turing to see whether computers 'think' and have 'intelligence'."
September 11, 2003: Beyond
Voice Recognition, to a Computer That Reads Lips. By Anne Eisenberg.
The New York Times (no fee reg. req'd.). "[T]eaching computers to
read lips might boost the accuracy of automatic speech recognition. Listeners
naturally use mouth movements to help them understand the difference between
'bat' and 'pat,' for instance. If distinctions like this could be added
to a computer's databank with the aid of cheap cameras and powerful processors,
speech recognition software might work a lot better, even in noisy places.
Scientists at I.B.M.'s research center in Westchester County, at Intel's
centers in China and California and in many other labs are developing
just such digital lip-reading systems to augment the accuracy of speech
recognition. ... At Intel, too, researchers have developed software for
combined audiovisual analysis of speech and released the software for
public use as part of the company's Open Source Computer Vision Library,
said Ara V. Nefian, a senior Intel researcher who led the project. ...
Iain Matthews, a research scientist at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics
Institute who works mainly on face tracking and modeling, said that audiovisual
speech recognition was a logical step. 'Psychology showed this 50 years
ago,' he said. 'If you can see a person speaking, you can understand that
person better.'" September/October 2003: I
See What You Are Saying. By Dr. Judith Markowitz. Speech Technology
Magazine. "There's no doubt that speech recognition is an assistive
technology. Most of us are familiar with the use of dictation and voice-controlled
desktop navigation tools by people with repetitive stress injuries (RSI).
I've also seen a myriad of voice-activated implementations for people
with limb paralysis and weakness that have included hospital beds, wheelchairs,
environmental control systems and a complete feeding system (it was experimental
and hadn't resolved problems related to the administration of liquids).
There are also command-and-control systems for people with severe visual
impairments, such as a voice-activated photocopier developed at Pitney
Bowes. Now the American Sign Language project at DePaul University's School
of Computer Science, Telecommunications and Information Systems is building
a system that will guide deaf people through auditory minefields. ...
The goal of the DePaul researchers is to capture spoken instructions and
convert them into the fourth most widely-used language in the United States
-- American Sign Language (ASL). 'This involves transforming verbal communication
into an animated visual format,' says graduate student Sunny Srinirasan.
'It's really a machine-translation project where the translation is from
sounds to hand movements and positions.'" September 3, 2003: Digital
cam translates in a snap. BBC. "US researchers have come up with
a prototype camera that does away with phrase books and translates signs
almost instantly using the internet. It combines a pocket computer, a
digital camera and a wireless internet connection. ... 'One of the advantages
of all of this is that I am not translating words. I could have my translating
dictionary with me and pull out individual words. But the fact is the
computer can handle phrases and sentences and eventually it will handle
whole paragraphs,' said Dr [Howard] Taub. For example, it will soon be
able to handle a translation of a plaque at a historical site, something
which would be much harder to do using just a dictionary." July/August 2003: "Conversational"
Isn't Always What You Think It Is. By Dr. Bill Byrne. Speech Technology
Magazine. "To achieve a truly usable speech interface, conversational
style must be appropriate both for the task at hand and for type of relationship
the caller expects to have with the virtual agent. What's more, for some
speech applications, the basic tenets of conversational interface design
may not even apply. As mentioned above, human conversation is very dynamic
and not all speech applications should emulate interacting with the familiar
consumer-facing call center agents often heard on show floor demos or
speech application vendor Web sites. In fact, the best speech interfaces
can sometimes be rather terse or even seem impolite when taken out of
context. ... The requirement for speech application development to include
'personality' or 'persona' design first entered the speech industry after
the 1996 publication of book The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers,
Television, and New Media Like Real People by Byron Reeves and Clifford
Nass (CSLI Publications). In brief, the book put forth the strong hypothesis
that 'mediated life equals real life.' In other words, people can't help
but behave the same way in computer-human interactions as they do in human-human
interactions." August 7, 2003: Neural-Network
Technology Moves into the Mainstream. By Gene J. Koprowski. TechNewsWorld.
"Real-time data mining -- powered by neural-network technology --
has begun to remake the way large corporations manage customer accounts.
The technology has been helping companies gain deep insight into customer
purchasing patterns. ... The brain learns from experience, and that is
the general goal of neural-network technology, which is generally thought
to be the next major advancement in the computing industry. ... To be
sure, neural-networking technology falls under the umbrella of artificial
intelligence. 'AI is known by different names -- data mining, statistics,
machine learning -- and it has fallen in and out of fashion over the last
few decades, suffering from overhype and an inability to deliver,' Faye
Merrideth, a spokesperson for developer SAS, told TechNewsWorld. In recent
years, companies have taken batches of data and extracted information
from that data. This process generally has been conducted in the back
office. Now, however, the technologies are moving toward the front office
-- to sales representatives and others who need the information for immediate
decision-making to act upon business events at the front lines of an organization.
... 'Not only do they derive factual information from all that data, they're
using language-processing algorithms and structures to detect other facets,
such as underlying sentiments,' said [Sue] MacDonald, noting that the
software can help determine if customers are pleased, angry or indifferent."
July 24, 2003: Computer
Language Translation System Romances the Rosetta Stone. Information
Sciences Institute. "University of Southern California computer scientist
Franz Josef Och has developed a single system that can translate between
any two languages. ... Och spoke after the 2003 Benchmark Tests for machine
translation carried out in May and June of this year by the U.S. Commerce
Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology. Och's translations
proved best in the 2003 head-to-head tests against 7 Arabic systems (5
research and 2 commercial-off-the-shelf products) and 14 Chinese systems
(9 research and 5 off-the-shelf). ... 'Our approach uses statistical models
to find the most likely translation for a given input,' Och explained
'It is quite different from the older, symbolic approaches to machine
translation used in most existing commercial systems, which try to encode
the grammar and the lexicon of a foreign language in a computer program
that analyzes the grammatical structure of the foreign text, and then
produces English based on hard rules,' he continued. 'Instead of telling
the computer how to translate, we let it figure it out by itself.'" July 24, 2003: Chatting
with Online Characters. By Sebastian Ruple. PC Magazine News. "While
today's intelligent online characters, or bots, have disappointed some
people, two prominent partners have launched a new effort to find useful
e-learning and customer service applications for virtual people. Oddcast,
a company that makes conversational characters, and the ALICE AI Foundation,
a nonprofit research organization focused on advancing AIML (Artificial
Intelligence Markup Language) have announced a partnership to create smarter
intelligent online characters. The technology allows for personal interaction
with online agents that can function as customer service agents, tutors,
and the like." July 23, 2003: Socially
Intelligent Software - Agents Go Mainstream. Researchers are working
on ways to add social intelligence to software, letting people interact
with computers in a less static way and allowing computers to respond
to users' emotions more effectively. By Gene J. Koprowski. TechNewsWorld.
"While the popular conception of an agent is a cartoon character who talks
with or interacts with a visitor to a Web site, today's technologies are
much more sophisticated than that. Venture investors are eying the agent
niche -- and its associated artificial intelligence and linguistics technologies
-- as a possible major market opportunity. 'By conducting dialogue with
customers, virtual agent technologies can more quickly identify customers'
problems and therefore provide appropriate solutions faster than traditional
search interfaces,' Timothy Hickernell, senior program director for Web
and collaboration strategies at Meta Group, told TechNewsWorld."
July 13, 2003: Software
to help English composition. The Yomiuri Shimbun. "Tokushima
University aims to start selling from March artificial intelligence software
it is developing with help from the private sector that helps users write
in English. Using the software, one can type a keyword or short sentence
in Japanese and the program will suggest several sentences in both Japanese
and English from which the user can choose the one he or she was trying
to compose. This project is based on a study of artificial intelligence
by Prof. Fuji Nin of the university. ... The software has been designed
to infer the user's intention and come up with the best examples. It also
has been programmed to understand and suggest not only formal, but also
colloquial language." July 9, 2003: L.V.
man patents 'ethical' artificial intelligence program. By Kimberly
Corbett. Daily Press. "Years of drumming away on his laptop keys
have finally paid off for Lucerne Valley inventor and author John E. LaMuth,
50, as the United States Patent Office recognized his efforts on July
1 and approved his patent for ethical artificial intelligence. 'I'm really
stoked about finally getting it approved,' LaMuth said, who filed the
patent in 1999. 'The sky's the limit.' LaMuth said his innovation represents
the first language analyzer that incorporates ethical and motivational
terms as part of a computer system. 'It enables a computer to reason and
speak in an ethical fashion," LaMuth said. 'Nobody has made an application
like this.' ... 'The main goal of AI is to have a computer and be able
to converse with it to the point where you believe it has human values,'
LaMuth said. 'Imagine a computer that could reason and talk to you.'" July 9, 2003: Talking
computers nearing reality. By Michael Kanellos. CNET News. "Machines
that listen and talk like humans are becoming a reality, many researchers
and executives say. The technical kinks, high costs and application misfires
that have held back the acceptance of speech recognition and activation--one
of computing's Holy Grails--are being ironed out, they say. As a result,
companies are coming out with a variety of products that will let consumers
access databases using voice commands, or transform e-mails into one-
or two-way verbal exchanges. ... The dream of conversational computers
has been around since the beginning of the digital age, and it's typically
been a fitful one due to the inherent complexities. The Turing test--building
a machine that can respond like a human via typed messages--was posed
by World War II era computing pioneer Alan Turing. It's still unsolved.
One challenge is that humans typically don't follow rigid rules when speaking.
... To date, voice recognition has made the most inroads in computing
devices for those with mental or physical challenges, including epilepsy
and carpal-tunnel syndrome. Now the directions of both research and marketing
have changed. Rather than developing a machine that can converse, researchers
are creating computers that can understand speech as a function of probability,
the basis of much of Microsoft's artificial intelligence work. Yoda, a
speech-to-text engine under development at Microsoft, can turn spoken
word into coherent text e-mail messages by studying a user's habits, said
Alex Acero, manager of the speech research group at Microsoft. Yoda doesn't
look for an object to follow a verb, but it knows that a particular sound
pattern ('meet') will likely be followed by a limited number of your now
familiar sound patterns ('in the conference room' or 'tomorrow')." June 18/25, 2003: Software
referees group calls. By Kimberly Patch. Technology Research News.
"Researchers from Palo Alto Research Center, Inc. (PARC), Stanford
University, and Carnegie Mellon University have devised a scheme that
gives a group of wireless phone or handheld computer users a more natural
teleconferencing environment by keeping track of who is talking when.
The scheme uses the moment-by-moment dynamics of talk to determine which
members of a group are actively conversing with each other, and adjusts
the audio accordingly, said Paul Aoki, a researcher at Palo Alto Research
Center. ... The researchers tapped a sociological discipline -- conversation
analysis -- to find ways to automatically tell who is talking to whom.
... Conversation analysts review examples of human interaction in order
to understand how these practices work. The researchers quantified speech
patterns gleaned by conversation analysts that generally show whether
or not people are in conversation, and built software that determines
what grouping of people is supported by the best evidence." June 23, 2003: Computer
Scientist Julia Hirschberg Explores Frontiers of Computational Linguistics.
By Joseph Kennedy. Columbia News. "While artificial intelligence
researchers have managed thus far to avoid creating monsters like HAL,
the idea of humans and computers speaking to each other is no longer the
stuff of science fiction. It is instead the driving force behind the growing
discipline of computational linguistics, which studies the computational
aspects of human language. 'Basic speech recognition systems have now
become commonplace,' says Julia Hirschberg, who joined the Department
of Computer Science in Fall 2002. 'Researchers today are moving into some
very interesting and complex areas. We're looking at how to enable computers
to recognize speech errors, perform audio browsing and retrieval of email,
and recognize and produce emotional speech.' June 10, 2003: What
a chatterbot! By Anita Bora. Rediff Guide to the Net. "We survey
a few of the Web's coolest chat bots to find out how close they are to
replacing real conversation. It all started with Eliza, a program developed
by Joseph Weizenbaum of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which
made natural conversation possible with a computer." June 7, 2003: Pick
a Language, Any Language. By Katie Dean. Wired News. "Like the
elite group of government agents on the 1960s television show, a group
of computer scientists and natural language experts were given a 'mission'
earlier this week: within a month, build a program that translates between
English and a randomly chosen language. The project, funded by the Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency, challenges researchers to quickly build
translation tools when unforeseen needs arise." June 6, 2003: Breaking
through the computer/human language barrier. By Ed Brock. News Daily.
"One could call Alison Alvarez of Jonesboro an erstwhile Dr. Dolittle
of the computer world. ... Alvarez already has a bachelor's degree in
computer science and Japanese from George Washington University in Washington,
D.C. She became fascinated with artificial intelligence when, at 17, she
underwent a procedure to have titanium springs and rods attached to her
vertebrae to correct a severe case of scoliosis. 'After becoming partially
artificial myself, I have had a different way of looking at artificial
life,' Alvarez said in her biography provided by the Cooke Foundation.
... [H]er eventual goal is to find a way to teach computers to truly understand
human speech. Her knowledge of Japanese will be useful in that because
it depends heavily on context and is an 'Altaic' language, a language
family in which the verb always comes at the end. 'They're basically the
most difficult language if your going to use natural languages,' Alvarez
said. One of the more difficult things to teach a computer is how to understand
the overlying narrative and 'reference resolution,' Alvarez said. In other
words, when the word 'they' appears in a lengthy transcript the program
has to be able to understand which 'they' are being referred to according
to the context of the overall conversation." June 2003: The
Translation Challenge - Software based on rules, examples, or statistics
seeks to erase language barriers. It's far from perfect, but sometimes
close is good enough. By Chip Walter. Technology Review. "In the
early, post-World War II days of computing, scientists dreamed of creating
software so intelligent it could accurately translate one language into
another. If computers could crack enemy codes, the thinking went, then
why not foreign languages? Five decades later, researchers are still working
on the problem. But what was a dream in the 1950s has become an overwhelming
demand as business increasingly ignores traditional borders. ... Researchers
are making progress today using three basic approaches drawn from natural-language
processing. Knowledge-based machine translation ... A second approach,
example-based systems ... Statistical techniques also depend on computing
power to compare reams of previously translated text. However ..."
June 2003: Computers
That Speak Your Language - Voice recognition that finally holds up
its end of a conversation is revolutionizing customer service. Now the
goal is to make natural language the way to find any type of information,
anywhere. By Wade Roush. Technology Review. "If computers could understand
and respond to such routine natural-language requests, the results would
be win-win: airlines wouldn't need to hire so many agents, and consumers
wouldn't have to struggle with the confusion of touch-tone interfaces
that leave them furiously tapping the '0' button, vainly trying to reach
a live operator. Futurists have been envisioning such a world since at
least 1968, when 2001: A Space Odyssey's HAL 9000 became the archetypal
voice-interactive computer. Academic and corporate researchers intrigued
by the sheer coolness of the idea have been tinkering for just as long
with systems for recognizing and responding to human speech. But technologies
don't take hold because they're cool: they need a business imperative.
For language processing, it's the enormous expense of live customer service
that's finally driving the technologies out of the lab. ... Such improvements
have set up natural-language systems for explosive growth: 43 percent
of North American companies have either purchased interactive voice response
software for their call centers or are conducting pilot studies, according
to Forrester Research, a technology analysis firm. As more companies replace
their old touch-tone phone menus, today's $500 million market for telephone-based
speech applications will grow -- reaching $3.5 billion by 2007, according
to Steve McClure, a vice president in the software research group at market
analysis firm IDC." May 29, 2003: I
Really Know What You Mean. By Sebastian Rupley. PC Magazine. "For
years, understanding and translating natural language has been one of
technology's brass rings. ... After all, if machines could accurately
understand concepts in language -- and not just generate partially accurate
associations between keywords -- search engines and text-mining applications
could start to surprise us, and artificial intelligence applications could
move ahead. A New York startup, Meaningful Machines, is banking on a new
approach that works, in part, by associating phrases and parts of phrases
with each other. 'We like to say that our technology is for machine understanding,
not just for machine translation,' says Steve Klein, Chairman and CEO
of Meaningful Machines. ... 'We use a statistical model to evaluate phrases,
and we've moved away from the historical natural language technologies,
which have relied on rule-based approaches,' says Klein. 'What people
have found out is that there are just too many exceptions to the rules
for rule-based natural language to be very accurate. With increased processing
and database power upon us, statistical and phrase-based approaches are
more realistic than they were before.'" May 20, 2003: How
do the machines really feel about The Matrix? 'It doesn't sound fun
to me,' says Ally the Chatbot. By James Cowan. National Post. "[T]he
humans are divided on the film -- but what do the sentient machines think?
To find out, the National Post interviewed Ally the Chatbot, one of the
many artificial intelligence programs posted on the Internet. ... NP:
So, did you enjoy The Matrix Reloaded? A: No, I didn't enjoy The Matrix
Reloaded. NP: Why not? A: It doesn't sound fun to me. It sounds
dangerous." May 15, 2003: Making
Computers Understand. Column by Leslie Walker. Washington Post TechNews.
"Eli Abir, who never used a computer until 1993, seems an improbable
character to illustrate how innovation is alive and well in techno-land.
Yet my encounter with him helped convince me of just that. Abir, 46, claims
to have unlocked the mystery of 'context' in human language with a series
of algorithms that enable computers to decipher the meaning of sentences
-- a puzzle that has stumped scientists for decades. ... Abir's challenge
-- and that of computer science -- is how to help machines 'understand'
context in human language, to get around the ambiguity created when words
mean different things depending on usage. 'Bar' means something different
when we say 'the corner bar' than when we say 'she raised the bar' or
'he passed the bar.' There have been several approaches to helping computers
grasp those distinctions. One is a 'grammatical' method that tries to
tag every word and apply language rules. Another is a statistical system
that makes word-to-word comparisons in previously translated text and
then consults the matches later to calculate probable meanings when it
encounters each word again in untranslated text. Abir's approach involves
a variation of the second method. His company spent last year encoding
his ideas into software algorithms that perform novel forms of pattern
analysis that rely on phrases -- rather than words -- as the core unit
of meaning." May 5, 2003: What
You Mean, Not What You Say. By Peter Coffee and Timothy Dyck. eWeek.
"Voice recognition and other complex pattern recognition software
tasks such as computer vision or document search are just in the beginning
stages of understanding and taking advantage of query context. This is
something that humans do instinctively. We unconsciously rely on clues
such as speaker identity, location, current activities and the general
topic of conversation surrounding a specific utterance to help us fill
in missing sounds and words. This isn't all that different from the 'frame
model' that's been part of artificial intelligence discussions since the
1960s. April 14, 2003: Artificial
intelligence scopes out spam. By Dave Strickler. Network World. "In
the cat-and-mouse game of the antispam industry, staying one step ahead
of spammers is difficult because they constantly exploit the weaknesses
of e-mail keyword filtering. But the newest artificial-intelligence filtering
technology may adapt faster than the spammers can alter their messages.
Artificial intelligence techniques closely resemble the way our brains
learn. Once we learn a skill, we use it to reason with. Using artificial
intelligence to detect spam is done in the same way. ... Humans can quickly
skim a message to judge if it is spam. Referencing keywords by their location
in a sentence lets us understand the difference between 'chicken breasts'
as food and 'bare breasts' as pornography. Similarly, natural-language
algorithms break down messages into sentences and analyze their meaning.
With considerable processing effort, natural-language processing technology
pieces together the meaning of messages by analyzing the words, sentences
and paragraphs in the reverse order from which the algorithms originally
took them apart. ... While there never will be a system that stops 100%
of spam, artificial intelligence techniques come closer to that goal than
ever before." April 11, 2003: A
computer with a mind of its own is not so far-fetched. By Sarah Brett.
Belfast Telegraph. "'The great question is, will it ever be possible
to build machines which perform learning, creativity and conscious- ness
in the same way as people do?' Since he was in short trousers, Professor
Paul McKevitt has been fascinated by both science fact and science fiction.
... 'Artificial intelligence (AI) has the power to transform the lives
of people with disabilities, and make all our lives richer and more fulfilling',
he smiles. He's got some fantastic ideas - ideas that could enable him
to retire before his father - if there was a capitalist bone in his body.
'Natural language processing is my main interest, getting computers to
under- stand and use human language', he explains. ... 'The ultimate goal
is intelligent systems that are like people - like in the film Blade Runner'.
... Why is it that while we strive to advance technology, all our films
about intelligent systems involve a worst case scenario for the human
race? ... 'People are afraid of machines, even though we build them. There's
a fear they might take over, become more intelligent than we are - but
if that's the case, then just like HAL, they would be subject to all our
frailties, like mental illness.' ... 'My latest research work is focused
on computational storytelling.'" April 10, 2003: World's
Largest Chatter Bot Competition Underway at ChatterBoxChallenge.com.
PRNewswire / available from Silicon Valley Business Ink. "Eighty-eight
Chatter Bots from around the world were entered in the 2003 Chatter Box
Challenge sponsored by Zabaware Inc. A Chatter Bot, also known simply
as a bot, is software programmed with artificial intelligence that is
able to carry on intelligent conversations with human beings. This is
the third year for the competition. According to Zabaware President Robert
Medeksza, 'Zabaware hopes to promote further research and development
in the area of artificial intelligence by sponsoring this contest.' Since
2001, the number of entries in the competition skyrocketed from 48 to
88 making this year's competition the largest in the world. Award winning
bots are selected through a combination of scores from the general public
and a panel of judges. The general public is encouraged to visit the challenge
website and vote for their favorite bot. Public opinion plays a significant
role in determining the winners. On-line voting is currently underway
and continues until April 30, 2003. Voting instructions, details of the
rules and profiles of all the bots and their inventors are available at
http://www.chatterboxchallenge.com." April 7, 2003: How
do you say "regime change" in Arabic? Don't look for your
tattered dictionary -- just pull out the Phraselator!. By Katharine Mieszkowski.
Salon (complete article can be accessed via free day pass). "[Ace]
Sarich is the vice president of VoxTec in Annapolis, Maryland, a division
of Marine Acoustics, a military contractor. He was in Kuwait training
troops on using a handheld device called the 'Phraselator,' a one-way
language translator that's the size of a large PDA and weighs about a
pound. The Phraselator uses speech-recognition technology called Dynaspeak,
developed by SRI International. It recognizes phrases phonetically, and
then matches them to the prerecorded Arabic phrases. ... The Phraselator
first saw battle in Afghanistan, where it communicated in four different
languages: Pashtu, Dari, Urdu, and Arabic. In Kandahar, Army military
police used it to communicate with prisoners of war. ... At Carnegie Mellon
University, a group of computer scientists working with three local Pittsburgh
companies, Mobile Technologies, Multi Modal Technologies and Cepstral,
last year created a prototype of a device called the 'speechlator' that
translates medical interviews from English to Egyptian Arabic and back.
The speech-recognition component translates the English to 'interlingua,'
a computer-readable intermediate language. 'That language is a mathematical
language almost like a logic,' says Alan Black, a research computer scientist
with Carnegie Mellon." March 31, 2003: Getting
The Message - It ain't just what you say, it's the way that you say
it. By Paul Wallich. IEEE Spectrum. "An NSF-sponsored project on
'talk-printing' may give a sense of where the state of the art is going.
Elizabeth Shriberg, Andreas Stolcke, and Kemal Sönmez of SRI International
(Menlo Park, Calif.) are utilizing variations in pitch, rhythm, and speech
volume -- information that speech-recognition programs typically throw
out -- to refine word and sentence recognition, to identify speakers,
and even to tell casual chats from serious discussions or the dissemination
of orders and instructions. Collectively, these variations in speaking
style are known as prosody. They have traditionally been viewed as statistical
noise that speech recognition programs must filter out while finding the
best match between a series of 10- or 20-millisecond sound samples and
a database of likely words or phonemes. But for the SRI group they are
precisely what turns a string of sounds into information. Prosody can
help analysts make sense of otherwise ambiguous transcriptions, says Stolcke,
pointing out that conventional recognition tools would show no difference
between 'Don't go!' and 'Don't! Go!'" March 24, 2003: Dog
translation device coming to U.S. Reuters / available from CNN. "A
Japanese toy maker claims to have developed a gadget that translates dog
barks into human language and plans to begin selling the product -- under
the name Bowlingual -- in U.S. pet stores, gift shops and retail outlets
this summer. Tokyo-based Takara Co. Ltd. says about 300,000 of the dog
translator devices have been sold since its launch in Japan late last
year. ... Cited as one of the coolest inventions of 2002 by Time magazine,
Bowlingual consists of a 3-inch long wireless microphone that attaches
to a dog collar and transmits sounds to a palm-sized console that is linked
to a database." March 22, 2003: I,
Robot - by baby steps. The latest creation at MIT's media lab, a robot
named Ripley, can't play chess or guide spacecraft. He's more like a rather
slow-witted infant. By Michael Valpy. The Globe and Mail. "AI's avant-garde
reality in 2003 is Ripley, rather resembling the head of an amiable mechanical
Airedale. He's the creation of 34-year-old Deb Roy, founder and director
of the cognitive-machines group at MIT's famed media lab, who has been
building robots since his Winnipeg childhood. ... [W]hat looks to humans
to be difficult for robots, like playing chess, is in fact mindlessly
easy. And what looks easy -- because it's easy for humans to do -- is
mind-numblingly complex. Like learning language. Ripley is not being programmed
with scripted speech. He is being taught the meanings of words and how
to speak, the way a human child would be. ... Ripley learns language by
looking at an object, touching it and hearing the word for it. In the
media lab it is called 'grounding.' ... The team is about to teach Ripley
to understand the idea of point of view. When the researcher talking to
Ripley describes a beanbag as being on his own left, it will be on Ripley's
right. In effect, Mr. [Nick] Mavridis says, it will allow Ripley to step
outside himself and grasp the notion of 'other.' ... Robots, Prof. [Anne]
Foerst says, will never be humans. But they could be somebodies -- individual
selves." March 17, 2003: Making
Computers Talk - Say good-bye to stilted electronic chatter: new synthetic-speech
systems sound authentically human, and they can respond in real time.
By Andy Aaron, Ellen Eide and John F. Pitrelli. Scientific American Explore.
"What are the immediate uses of this technology? They include delivery
of up-to-the-minute news, reading machines for the handicapped, automotive
voice controls and retrieving e-mail over the phone--or any system where
the vocabulary is large, the content changes frequently or unpredictably,
and a visual display isn't practical. In the future Supervoices could
enhance video and computer games, handheld devices and even motion-picture
production. ... Scientists have attempted to simulate human speech since
the late 1700s, when Wolfgang von Kempelen built a 'Speaking Machine'
that used an elaborate series of bellows, reeds, whistles and resonant
chambers to produce rudimentary words. ... Software ... converts the written
text from a series of words into one of phonemes. The software notes features
of interest about each phoneme, such as what phonemes preceded and followed
it, or whether it is the first or last one in a sentence. It also identifies
parts of speech such as nouns or verbs in the text. ... We often debate
among ourselves the holy grail of text-to-speech technology. Should it
be indistinguishable from a live human speaker, as in a Turing test?"
March 6, 2003: Interactive
robots. By Monique Smith, Riverside University High School. On Milwaukee.
"Teens who have the Internet at home are crazy about instant messaging.
... But what if one is buddy-less? Worry no more thanks to IM programs
known as chat bots. Chat bots are programs designed to 'virtually' give
onliners a buddy that chats back with them, minus any heartbreak. Your
chat bot friend will never keep you waiting with a BRB (be right back)
message while it runs to the kitchen for a snack. Chat bots remain online
day and night, so there's always someone to talk to. In addition, they
always write back without delay. ... Pretty soon chat bots will communicate
amongst themselves and begin their own Internet colonies! They'll be so
well developed that the phrase 'artificial intelligence' will take on
a whole new meaning." February 27, 2003: Artificial
stupidity, Part 2 - Can chatterbots be as dumb as a box of hammers
and still pass the Turing test? Go ask ALICE, she might know. By John
Sundman. Salon. [Part 1 appears below.] "A
vocal camp in the brainy 'philosophy of mind' profession believes that
the Turing test should be relegated to the history books, but I'm going
to assert axiomatically that the test, as it is generally understood by
ordinary humans like you and me, is interesting. The question of whether
computers can successfully pose as human beings has obsessed writers,
filmmakers and computer scientists for decades. Therefore, without getting
sucked into a philosophical vortex about the nature of minds, machines,
intelligence and so forth, all we need to find out -- if we want to know
if the Loebner competition matters -- is whether there exists a more respectable
variant of the Turing test. As far as I can determine, there doesn't.
The Turing test is, as it were, state-of-the-art." February 26, 2003: Artificial
stupidity - The saga of Hugh Loebner and his search for an intelligent
bot has almost everything: Sex, lawsuits and feuding computer scientists.
There's only one thing missing: Smart machines. [Part 1 of 2.]
By John Sundman. Salon. "Since 1989 Loebner has spent, by his account,
more than $200,000 and a thousand hours of unpaid time to hasten the arrival
of intelligent machines. He has set aside a gold medal and $100,000 in
cash for the creator of the first machine that can pass for human. In
the meantime he gives out annual prizes for programs that come closest
to a long-sought holy grail in the artificial intelligence community:
passing the Turing test. ... To win the Loebner competition, software
programs must mimic human conversation. Such programs are known as 'chatting
robots' or, more often, 'chatterbots' or simply 'bots.' But today's academic
A.I. researchers consider the chatterbot approach simpleminded. The Loebner
competition, they argue, isn't a real measure of progress in artificial
intelligence but merely a 'bot beauty contest.' ... Alan Turing was the
British mathematician, cryptographer and prototypical computer scientist
who, some say, did as much as Winston Churchill to save Western civilization
from the Nazis. ... The Turing test is the canonical benchmark by which
we humans will know that computers have caught up with us in the smarts
department. ... Long known to historians of the computer, the Turing test
emerged from obscurity and became part of popular culture in 1966, when
Joseph Weizenbaum's simple 200-line Eliza program, which used a few simple
tricks to generate bland responses to human-posed questions, fooled people
into thinking they were conversing with an intelligent being." February 19, 2003: 18th
century theory is new force in computing. By Michael Kanellos. ZDNet.
"Thomas Bayes, one of the leading mathematical lights in computing
today, differs from most of his colleagues: He has argued that the existence
of God can be derived from equations. His most important paper was published
by someone else. And he's been dead for 241 years. February 6, 2003: Niyogi
uses computers to analyze language evolution. By Steve Koppes. The
University of Chicago Chronicle (Vol. 22 No. 9). "If a computer could
master language as well as a child does, the feat would rank as one of
the greatest technological achievements of our time. But so far, computers
fall far short of the capability. 'How do children learn the language
of their parents with seemingly effortless ease?' asks Partha Niyogi,
Associate Professor in Computer Science, Statistics and the Physical Science
Collegiate Division. Linguists, psychologists and computer scientists
specializing in artificial intelligence would all like to know how to
answer that question. The computational analysis of how language evolves
may well hold the answer, suggests Niyogi, who is completing a book on
the topic. That is because children imperfectly learn the language of
their parents. ... Niyogi's ultimate goal is to build computer systems
that can interact with and learn from humans. The first step is to teach
computers how to translate sounds into words." February 3, 2003: Chatting
with a real hot, intelligent bot. By Chee Yih Yang. The Star Online.
"Many Malaysians have taken to the SMS (short message service) phenomenon.
It's cheaper than voice-calls, and a little less rude than too since the
receiver is under no pressure to respond immediately. What if you're stuck
on a long train ride back from work, and all your SMS messages are not
being replied to? Well, you could chat with a total stranger who is guaranteed
to reply. The catch is, as you may have suspected, that she's a "bot"
or a virtual entity. Plus, you'll have to pay for the service. Some time
in the middle of this month, VQ Interactive Sdn Bhd (www.botizen.com)
and Macrokiosk Sdn Bhd (www.macrokiosk.com ), both Multimedia Super Corridor
(MSC) status companies, will launch an artificial intelligence or AI-based
platform that provides 24-hour SMSing to Malaysian mobile phone users.
The application, BOTizen-SMS@Kelie, allows users to chat with its host
'Kelie.' The service is billed as something that mimics IRC (Internet
relay chat), since the replies are instantaneous, any time of the day.
... Kelie is not only going to be marketed towards the bored and the restless
- VQ Interactive is trying to convince Malaysian companies to incorporate
Kelie into their advertising and promotional campaigns." January 31, 2003: A
cure for the call centre queue blues. By Alan Cane.The Financial Times.
"So would it not be better (and cheaper), the argument goes, if call
centres could be done away with and replaced by computers? This is the
kind of thinking which has informed the work of Transversal, a start-up
spun out of Cambridge University, and which now has Fujifilm UK, Sony
Computer Entertainment Europe and furniture retailer MFI among the customers
for its Metafaq system. Transversal's founders, the physicists David MacKay
and Davin Yap, started from the premise that 80 per cent of enquiries
made to call centres have been made before and therefore should be susceptible
to being answered without human intervention. Establishing a database
is not difficult. The complexity comes in developing a system which can
'understand' inquiries couched in natural language from individuals who
are not computer specialists. The number of answers may be finite but
the number of ways the questions could be asked is infinite. ... MacKay
and Yap tackled the problem with a combination of computational linguistics
and Baysian networks, a pair of mathematical techniques which are giving
'artificial intelligence' back some of the respectability it lost when
much ballyhooed systems in the 1980s and 1990s failed to deliver. Computational
linguistics breaks down the elements of natural language into units that
a computer can process. Baysian networks organise discrete bodies of knowledge
by tracing cause-and-effect among the key variables and assigning numeric
values to them. Essentially, a Baysian system can predict a likely outcome
from incomplete data." January 15, 2003: Educators
go high-tech to check essay exams. By Rhea R. Borja. USA Today. "Under
the faint glow and ambient hum of their computers, the 11th-graders at
Heritage Jr. Sr. High School in Monroeville, Ind., focused on their online
English essay and short-answer test. The clacking of computer keys filled
the room. But when time was up, these students didn't hand anything in.
Instead, they hit 'enter,' and the essays shot into cyberspace to be graded.
But forget the notion of an eagle-eyed grammarian, red pencil in hand,
looking over these papers. Or any human, for that matter. Instead, the
essays were graded by a high-tech artificial-intelligence system -- a
computer that notes misspellings, assesses sentence structure and reviews
writing style. Mr. Chips, meet 'Hal.' ... Compared with humans, computers
grade essays faster, more efficiently and more accurately, say some education
officials and testing companies such as Vantage Learning, which created
the IntelliMetric essay-scoring technology, and Educational Testing Service,
which developed the E-Rater, another scoring system. ... Educators like
the relatively low cost and speed of essay-scoring technology: Prices
vary, but it costs about $1 per computer-scored essay compared with about
$5 for a human-graded essay. Also, essays are scored in five to 10 minutes
by humans, in less than two seconds by computer, says [Scott] Elliot.
By most accounts, students also like taking the tests online." January 1 - 8, 2003: Interface
gets the point. By Kimberly Patch, Technology Research News. "Tone
of voice can mean a lot. Your colleague can be giving you a complement
or an insult depending on how she inflects the phrase "great work."
Gestures can be just as expressive. Communicating with computers is much
more basic. Try to insult an uncooperative speech recognition system by
telling it where to go, and, assuming your diction is clear, it will simply
show the words on-screen without gleaning much about your dark mood. Adding
an appropriate gesture would make things very clear to even a tone-deaf
human, but computers are generally gesture-blind as well. Researchers
from Pennsylvania State University and Advanced Interface Technologies
are trying to change that. They are working to untangle the relationships
between prosody -- the loudness, pitch, and timing of speech -- and gestures
in an attempt to improve the way computers recognize human gestures." January 1, 2003: Yes,
they're cute - Will they think someday? By Mikiko Miyakawa. Daily
Yomiuri. "Is it possible for robots to have minds like human beings?
Prof. Hiroshi Tsukimoto of Tokyo Denki University attempted to answer
this controversial question by focusing on robots' capability of understanding
language in his book titled 'Robotto no Kokoro' (Robot's Mind). In considering
this issue, ... While many scientists claim that computers will become
able to understand and use languages just like people, Tsukimoto, an expert
on artificial intelligence, believes it will be impossible for computers
to do so as they have no bodies. The professor claims that the comprehension
of languages involves 'functional physical movement.' In other words,
understanding of words is associated with images built up through one's
physical experiences, he said." December 27, 2002: Robot
technology in hospital upgrade. By Barry Hailstone. The Advertiser.
"The world's most technically advanced operating theatre will be
installed next year in one of Adelaide's oldest private hospitals. A $1.4
million robotic technology operating suite, part of a $16.4 million redevelopment
at Wakefield Hospital, would mean shorter surgery times and greater efficiency,
chief executive officer Catherine Miller said yesterday. 'Patients would
spend less time under anaesthesia and in surgery,' she said. The operating
theatre's robotic technology and voice-activated command system would
link equipment within the operating theatre to other departments around
the hospital under the changes." December 21, 2002: Voice
holds the key. BBC. "Speech recognition has always been something
of a holy grail for the hi-tech industry. For years the technology has
promised much but it has failed to become part of everyday life. But now
the software is reflecting a changed climate where security is paramount.
Recent advances in speech technology have led to a whole new range of
products with different aspirations. December 10, 2002: Human
or Computer? Take This Test. By Sara Robinson. The New York Times
(no-fee reg. req'd). "As chief scientist of the Internet portal Yahoo,
Dr. Udi Manber had a profound problem: how to differentiate human intelligence
from that of a machine. His concern was more than academic. Rogue computer
programs masquerading as teenagers were infiltrating Yahoo chat rooms,
collecting personal information or posting links to Web sites promoting
company products. ... The roots of Dr. Manber's philosophical conundrum
lay in a paper written 50 years earlier by the mathematician Dr. Alan
Turing, who imagined a game in which a human interrogator was connected
electronically to a human and a computer in the next room. The interrogator's
task was to pose a series of questions that determined which of the other
participants was the human. ... Dr. Manuel Blum, a professor of computer
science at Carnegie Mellon who took part in the Yahoo conference, realized
that the failures of artificial intelligence might provide exactly the
solution Yahoo needed. Why not devise a new sort of Turing test, he suggested,
that would be simple for humans but would baffle sophisticated computer
programs. Dr. Manber liked the idea, so with his Ph.D. student Luis von
Ahn and others Dr. Blum devised a collection of cognitive puzzles based
on the challenging problems of artificial intelligence. The puzzles have
the property that computers can generate and grade the tests even though
they cannot pass them. The researchers decided to call their puzzles Captchas,
an acronym for Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers
and Humans Apart (on the Web at www.captcha.net). December 9, 2002: More
products arising to fight flood of spam - Perfect solution to junk
e-mail yet to be found. By Francine Brevetti. San Mateo County Times.
"If you think the spam has piled up in your e-mail's inbox recently,
consider that this unwanted communication actually might be good for the
economy. In the last year more than two dozen new companies offering spam-fighting
technology -- especially aimed at businesses -- have come to the market,
according to analysts. Several of them originate in the Bay Area. ...
[Joyce] Graff said her corporate clients calculate the amount of spam
they get on their networks represents between 30 and 50 percent of their
e-mail. ... Jeff Ready, Corvigo's chief executive officer, said Corvigo
uses natural language; its technology reads a message in context, it does
not merely scan for certain words. 'We deploy our artificial intelligence
on our hardware,' he said. 'It sits between their firewall and their mail
server, traffic comes in and our box filters the messages.'" November 25, 2002: CMU
scientists designing automated phone system that 'speaks your language.'
By Byron Spice. Post-Gazette. "[Maxine] Eskenazi, a systems scientist,
and computer scientist Alan Black, both of CMU's Language Technologies
Institute, are beginning a three-year project that will help the Port
Authority of Allegheny County develop an automated information system
for its bus and light rail schedules and make it mother-friendly. The
system would respond to spoken queries, not to numbers that the caller
punches on the phone's keypad. ... Getting computers to carry on a spoken
dialogue with people isn't easy, but it's possible. The Language Technologies
Institute already has done it, Black noted, as part of a program sponsored
by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Called CMU Communicator,
it's an automated airplane reservation phone line. 'You simply call and
say, 'I want to fly to Boston tomorrow and I don't want to fly through
Newark,'' Black said. The system then makes the reservation and prints
out tickets." October 14, 2002: Intel,
Microsoft Dip into Speech with SALT. By Thor Olavsrud. siliconvalley.internet.com.
"Aiming to help businesses extend their Web presences with speech,
Intel and Microsoft Monday announced they are jointly developing technologies
and a reference design based on the Speech Applications Language Tags
(SALT) 1.0 specification submitted to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
in August. ... Intel and Microsoft said their tools will support both
telephony and multimodal applications on a range of devices. The partners
believe the value proposition of such technology is clear: it stands to
reduce costs associated with call center agents. A typical customer service
call costs $5 to $10 to support, while an automated voice recognition
system can lower that to 10 cents to 30 cents per call. Additionally,
voice recognition technology can be used to give employees access to critical
information while on the move. Earlier this year, market research firm
the Kelsey Group projected worldwide spending on voice recognition will
reach $41 billion by 2005. But Intel and Microsoft are by no means alone
in the space." October 14, 2002: Giving
innovation. By Janet Forgrieve. Rocky Mountain News. "When Hossein
Eslambolchi became president of AT&T Laboratories in August 2001,
his first goal was to hasten the pace of delivering new technology. ...
Today, 80 percent of the invention at the company's labs in Basking Ridge,
N.J., and Menlo Park, Calif., is focused on 'direct research,' he said.
That's new technology created after input from customers and aimed at
quickly meeting their business needs. ... Scientists are working on voice-over
IP, natural language, text-to-speech and artificial intelligence technologies,
all aimed at improving business for customers. For example, call center
customers can buy AT&T's 'How May I Help You,' a natural language
understanding system that cuts the time customers wait on the line and,
about 26 percent of the time, handles problems without an employee, he
said. The next version will have even more problem-solving ability, he
said, with the goal of eliminating the need for human intervention altogether." October 10, 2002: Web
watch - Virtual Ada. By Sean Dodson. The Guardian. "She calls
herself Ada1852. She claims to be the online, laudanum-addicted ghost
of Ada Byron Lovelace. In fact, she is a bot (software robot) and virtual
museum guide for the digital art magazine, Rhizome.org. Visitors to the
site can ask this virtual Ada questions. She replies with oblique answers,
and asks her own. She eventually suggests online works of art and provides
links to the pieces. Ada was the daughter of the poet Lord Byron ... Ada1852
is the creation of Christopher Fahey, a New York artist who became interested
in artificial intelligence programs. Finding most of them a little dull,
he rewrote one to create a more 'complicated' personality. The result
is an AI that is both prone to digressions and full of confessions." October 2, 2002: Computer-Human
Conversation Closer to Reality. By Cade Metz. PC Magazine. "Currently
available for download, the [Brainhat] system operates in a way familiar
to anyone with a grade school education. 'Remember diagramming sentences?
That's basically what we do,' explains [Kevin] Dowd. 'We extract semantic
value from language by parsing through it, identifying different parts
of speech, and organizing everything within various data structures.'
Once a sentence is broken into pieces that the system can recognize and,
to a certain extent, understand, it then manipulates these pieces -- turns
them into a related question, say -- in an effort to generate a feasible
response to the sentence. As a conversation continues, the system can
use what it's learned about each sentence to better understand subsequent
sentences and, thus, provide better responses." Audio demo available. September 30, 2002: Digital
Artworks That Play Against Expectations. By Matthew Mirapaul. The
New York Times (no-fee reg. req'd). "Ada1852 is a digital docent.
She conducts tours of the online-art site Rhizome.org by replying to questions
that are typed and transmitted over the Internet. Through these exchanges,
she can respond to a visitor's interests and suggest viewings of specific
Internet-based artworks, and then supply links to the pieces. Like a human
museum guide, Ada1852 occasionally departs from the scripted commentary
to make oddly personal remarks. During a recent chat session, the virtual
character was asked about a site and replied, 'Perhaps I am slipping into
madness.' Ada1852 is the creation of Christopher Fahey, a New York artist
who rewrote an existing artificial-intelligence program so that its bland,
computer-generated conversations with people would seem less mechanical.
'I did not want to build a person whose primary function was to be a nonperson,'
Mr. Fahey said. By giving Ada1852 a personality that verges on the disturbed,
he is subverting many notions about artificial intelligence. Mr. Fahey's
troubled tour guide is one of five online-art projects commissioned by
Rhizome.org, a nonprofit organization in New York. (The new works were
to be put online today at rhizome.org/commissions. Starting Wednesday
, they also can be seen at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in SoHo.)"
September 10, 2002: Words
to the wise on the Web. By Jonathan Skillings. CNET. "CNET News.com
caught up with [Geoffrey] Nunberg ["professor of linguistics at Stanford
University -- and until last year, a principal scientist at Xerox's legendary
Palo Alto Research Center"] recently to talk about how machines struggle
to make sense of the way people write and speak, and how the Internet
has people writing more now than ever before." September 9, 2002: PCs
and Speech - A Rocky Marriage: Dictation efforts faltered, but other
applications have fans. By Faith Keenan. BusinessWeek. "Die-hard
speech-recognition enthusiasts concede that the dictation market has been
a bust, but still believe speech technology will take root. They're particularly
excited about environments such as call centers, where consumers dangle
on help lines and navigate maddening touch-tone menus. Already, in some
locations, these have been replaced by friendly, human-sounding responders
that seem to understand natural speech and can deliver on request everything
from bank balances to weather forecasts and travel itineraries. Forget
about dictation, says Ronald Croen, CEO of Nuance Communications (NUAN
) in Menlo Park, Calif., which sells core recognition software that others
build into call-center applications. 'We've all realized there are more
diverse opportunities on the communications and services side,' he says.
Among the companies that have gone down this road are Yahoo! Inc. and
Amtrak. At Yahoo, subscribers pay $4.95 a month to interact with a virtual
responder named Jenni, who can help them find sports scores and weather
reports. And Amtrak's perky attendant, Julie, serves up schedule, fare,
and train-status information. ... Researcher Frost & Sullivan puts the
call-center market for such voice programs at $114 million in 2001." September 6, 2002: Web
May Hold the Key to Achieving Artificial Intelligence. By Ariana Eunjung
Cha. The Washington Post. "SmarterChild, a computer program, is part
of a new species of 'chatterbots' that are renewing debate about the extent
to which computers can achieve intelligence. The electronic personalities
of this generation use the vast repository of information on the World
Wide Web as their memory bank, not just some rigid database. ... The company
that conceived SmarterChild, Active Buddy Inc., created the bot as a marketing
tool that would engage people in conversation and then tell them about
various products or services. Other companies have begun using these systems
to help with customer service or Web searching. Eventually, however, some
believe that technicians will be able to turn programs like SmarterChild
into more intelligent systems. That is, the network will naturally begin
to evolve into a sort of global brain, one made up of the constellation
of the roughly 1 billion computers comprising the Internet." August 27, 2002: Hindi
chatbot breaks new ground. By Alfred Hermida. BBC. "A computer
chat program that speaks Hindi could open up computers to India's illiterate
millions. Computer science students in Chandigarh, 248 kilometres (154
miles) from Delhi, have developed an interactive software program called
Deepti which can converse intelligently with people in natural language.
... They believe that bots like Deepti could be used to make government
services more accessible." July 30, 2002: Digital'buddies'
latest in elaborate marketing tool. By Christine Frey. Los Angeles
Times / available from The Nando Times. "In a culture inundated with
advertising, companies have discovered a new way to connect with consumers
and make their messages stand out amid the din. They are using digital
'buddies' to spread word of their products on the Internet. The buddies
are software applications also known as 'bots.' They're programmed to
make friends and small talk, and they're eerily good at it. They take
cues from a human acquaintance's questions and answers and search databases
for conversational fodder. Bot-speak can be formulaic and stilted. It
can also be witty, provocative and startlingly lifelike. Buddies are not
mere motor-mouths. The more elaborate ones have quirks, preferences, yearnings
- virtual personalities. Their presence on the Web represents a powerful
new dimension in marketing. ... Computers first chatted in the mid-1960s,
when MIT professor Joseph Weizenbaum created a software program called
Eliza. Designed to converse in the manner of a psychotherapist, Eliza
asked people questions by rephrasing their previous statements. ... The
technology has only grown more sophisticated since then." July 7, 2002: Approximating
Life. By Clive Thompson. The New York Times Magazine; pages 30 -33
(no-fee reg. req'd). "Each morning, he wakes before dawn and watches
conversations stream by on his screen. Thousands of people flock to his
Web site every day from all over the world to talk to his creation, a
robot called Alice. It is the best artificial-intelligence program on
the planet, a program so eerily human that some mistake it for a real
person. As [Richard] Wallace listens in, they confess intimate details
about their lives, their dreams; they talk to Wallace's computer about
God, their jobs, Britney Spears. It is a strange kind of success: Wallace
has created an artificial life form that gets along with people better
than he does. ...Is she intelligent? If so, how? In 1950, the pioneering
British mathematician Alan Turing grappled with this question in the journal
Mind, where he first posed the 'Turing Test' -- the gold standard for
artificial thought. 'Can machines think?' he asked -- and immediately
noted that the question hinges, of course, on what 'thinking' is."
June 2002: Whatever
You Say. With speech-recognition software, your voice is the computer's
command. BY W. Wayt Gibbs. Scientific American. "Indeed, IBM announced
in March that it is increasing the number of researchers working on speech
technologies. Its ambitious, decade-long goal is to build systems that
can reliably transcribe (and act on) normal conversations taking place
in noisy rooms among people whose voices the computer has never been exposed
to before. 'We now have more than 100 researchers working on speech technologies,'
says David Nahamoo, who manages that group at IBM Research, 'and a similar
number working on natural-language understanding.'" March 30, 2002: The
Push for News Returns. By Kendra Mayfield. Wired News. "The University
of Michigan is working on a similar service called NewsInEssence, which
also uses natural language techniques to find and summarize multiple news
articles on the Web. ... NewsInEssence's search agent, called NewsTroll,
searches for stories related to the same event. The agent then enters
keywords into search engines of news sites and produces summaries of a
subset of stories that it finds. ... But artificial intelligence systems
like NewsInEssence and Newsblaster are far from perfect. Summaries aren't
always as coherent as those written by human editors. Newsblaster often
assumes that all articles in a particular category are about the same
event. Sometimes the sentences have odd punctuation and do not flow smoothly.
... 'I personally don't think it will be able to substitute a human editor,'
[Regina] Barzilay agreed. 'But it will be able to provide more efficient
access to what humans have written.'" February 25, 2002: UTD
forms human language technology institute. Dallas Business Journal.
"The University of Texas at Dallas said Monday it has established
the Human Language Technology Research Institute, aimed at advancing the
understanding and uses of natural language processing. ... 'Since Sept.
11, there has been a heightened interest in this work among federal agencies
and, consequently, millions of dollars are being made available for research
of the kind we will be doing at UTD,' [Sandacq] Harabagiu said. Harabagiu
and her colleagues will develop software that can quickly and reliably
process, identify, analyze and extract desired information from huge collections
of documents, composed of both text and speech." February 21, 2002: Whistle-Blower
Sites Mine Clues Amid Mountains of Suspicion. By Lisa Guernsey. The
New York Times. "The cost of staffing a permanent 24-hour call center,
with what he estimated would require more than 1,000 people, would have
been staggering. By contrast, the Internet complaint center and the terrorism
tip site jointly employ 75 people, about 40 of whom are part of the F.B.I.
Technology takes up the slack. Investigators do not have to spend time
entering data, and software can begin the filtering process for them.
As soon as a tip arrives, the message is parsed by software that looks
for keywords. Mr. [Richard L.] Johnston said that words like "bomb threat"
would automatically bump a message into a high-priority position where
it could be acted on immediately (although several tip sites advise people
to dial 911 if lives are clearly in imminent danger)." February 11, 2002: PC
but wrong. By Lee Dembart. International Herald Tribune. "As
long as the word is in the spelling checker's dictionary, it will not
pick up that it's the wrong one. The only words it will call to your attention
are the ones it can't find. This is part of a very deep problem in computer
science, which has been the bane of artificial intelligence since the
1950s: When computers 'read' a text, they do not understand what it means.
That's why machine translation remains so poor. Odd as it sounds, the
meaning of a sentence is not fully captured in its words." February 7, 2002: Computers
and language -The elements of style. The Economist. "Analysing
compressed data leads to impressive results in linguistics. ... But Emanuele
Caglioti and his colleagues at the University of Rome-La Sapienza have
found a more esoteric use for it. Using zipped files, they can identify
the authors of documents and reconstruct the family trees of languages.
The secret lies in the science of information theory, invented by Claude
Shannon in the 1940s. Shannon pointed out that the length of the instructions
used to encode a string of characters corresponds to the disorder, or
'entropy', of that string. ... Dr Caglioti and his colleagues have created
a program that can categorise documents by language or authorship, based
on these extra lengths." December 31, 2001: Free
translation software unveils Arab views. The Associated Press / available
from CNN.com. "In October, Cairo-based Sakhr Software released its
Arabic-to-English translation software -- free for the world to use --
on the company's Arabic language Web portal at Ajeeb.com. ... 'It's the
beginning of a solution to this misunderstanding problem,' said Fahad
Al-Sharekh, chief executive of Ajeeb.com. 'This is what's going to bridge
the gap between the two civilizations.' ... In Arabic, words that have
two dozen meanings can flow in long, un-punctuated sentences. Machine
translations require artificial intelligence, Al-Sharekh said. But artificial
intelligence takes time to instill. Since the launch of its service, Ajeeb
has employed human translators to tweak the computer's renditions of popular
pages to make them understandable in English. In doing so, the artificial
intelligence engine 'learns' from the corrections. 'Over time the accuracy
increases dramatically,' Al-Sharekh said." THERE'S MORE ! SEE THE REST OF THE NLP COLLECTION |
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