I’ve always thought the prospect of someday sitting down to converse with a robot would be so cool. And obviously I’m not the only one. There are more stories and movies about self-aware androids out there than you can shake a reverse-engineered Cyberdyne Systems endoskelton at. (That one’s a real knee-slapper with the Terminator geeks.)
Up to this point, however, those droid dreams have all been the stuff of science fiction and nothing more. I mean, let’s face it, if you want to get a computer to beat you at chess or figure out the square root of our national debt, no sweat. But asking for an understanding of the nuances of the English language can be a real buzz-killer for the electronic data set.
For instance, a human who reads a simple sentence like, “The boy caught the butterfly with the net,” will have no problem understanding that butterflies don’t usually fly around with a net under their wing. A computer, on the other hand, would be left scratching its head. If it had one. Surprisingly, though, computers may be on the cusp of figuring this whole language thing out.
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have found a tool that their programmed pals can use to start teaching themselves to unravel the mysteries of language—a little thing called the Internet. In their Never-Ending Language Learning system, or NELL, they give a computer some factual and relational challenges and set it off to explore the Web to figure it out. So, for 24 hours a day, seven days a week, the computer scans, extracts and classifies the text phrases it needs to create patterns and correlations.
“What’s exciting and significant about it is the continuous learning, as if NELL is exercising curiosity on its own, with little human help,” Oren Etzioni, a computer scientist at the University of Washington, said in a New York Times article. Google’s vice president of research, Alfred Spector added, “The technology is really maturing, and will increasingly be used to gain understanding. We’re on the verge now in this semantic world.”
Poo poo if you must, but this development could be one of those basic technological building blocks that quickly stacks up to tomorrow’s high-tech wow-makers. It’ll make the iPad as old-school as a stone tablet and chisel. You may be hitting Starbucks and treating a mechanized pal to a mug of hot oil and a conversation about a good book any day now.
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