How would you like to have a conversation with a computer and feel like you’re actually talking to a human being?
That would be the dream of many a person, I suppose, but what if we throw in a healthy dose of sarcasm? Would the prospect still entice you?
If the work of Michael Frank and Noah Goodman – both assistant professors at the esteemed institution Stanford – pans out, then we might very well have sarcastic computers at our disposal in the future.
The work of the two psychologists was recently published in the journal Science. It revolves around the idea that language is more than words and sentences thrown together to form coherent ideas. As we all know very well, communicating using verbal language – any language, for that matter – involves many other elements. These include social rules, context, and a whole lot of inference.
These elements are what the psychologists took into consideration when formulating a mathematical model that aims to predict pragmatic reasoning.
Taking these elements (and more, I presume), Frank and Goodman think that in the future, they can create sarcastic computers that can easily communicate with humans as if they were of the same species. Artificial intelligence as science fiction knows it, maybe?
Before you get all excited, it is worth noting that the researchers themselves say that there is still years of work ahead of them. That’s something worth waiting for. Or not.
Via Science Daily