What is computational linguistics?
Take a computer and a language and put them
together.
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Ok, seriously!
Eliza was born in 1966.
Eliza was simple, she was asked simple questions
and she answered in a simple way.
That’s why nobody expected her to make very
philosophical conversation.
Her father was MIT professor and computer
scientist, Joseph Weizenbaum.
He tried to have more complex dialogs with
her every day, but the best result was a dialog
like this:
Prof. Weizenbaum: ‘It seems that you hate
me.’
‘What makes you think I hate you?’
But when the professor said: ‘It seems that
you like me.’
She answered in the same way: ‘What makes
you think I like you?’
Hmm, no doubt, she didn’t understand the
difference between ‘to hate’ and ‘to
like’.
It seemed, she was emotionally unintelligent
or simpleminded, or didn’t think at all.
The professor was very sad because he didn’t
understand the reason why his daughter didn’t
make any progress.
She seemed like a robot, and the professor
didn’t know who he was conversing with any
more: a human or a machine?
He began to suspect that his daughter was
not human, but a machine.
But if she was a machine, how is it possible
that she responded grammatically correct fashion?
Could robots imitate human language?
Suddenly, the Turing-test came to mind.
His colleague, another computer scientist,
Alan Turing in 1950 in a paper proposed an
interesting possibility: machines might think
in the future.
The professor took Eliza and visited professor
Turing with the aim of going through the Turing-test.
The test was based on a simple assumption:
a human subject convers once with another
human, once with a machine.
If the subject could not tell the difference
between human and machine, the machine was
capable of thinking.
It also meant, however, that in the case of
a positive result, it would be impossible
to tell if Eliza was human or a machine.
It’s quite dangerous, isn’t it?
However, the test went according to expectations:
the test showed that there is still a difference
between human and machine language.
Eliza was a machine.
She was a computer program made to converse
naturally with humans.
She was one of the first attempts at reproduction
of human language, so she was able to have
only simple conversations.
But when Eliza learned that she was primitive,
she didn’t resign herself and decided to
improve her abilities, her language skills.
At the time, she was following a text-based
interactive approach which means the human
user provides a text-based input to generate
a response from the computer applying the
so-called keyword spotting process, so the
computer recognizes certain keywords in order
to give a reply.
Eliza had seen on the Internet a world-famous
wonderful star: Siri.
Siri was a speech-based interactive system
and Eliza admired her.
She wanted to be like Siri.
Siri was capable of recognizing speech.
This capacity involves the processing of the
user's speech as sound waves and the interpreting
of the language patterns.
Eliza heard that Siri was working for something
called computational linguistics and obviously
she also wanted to apply for a job there.
But for this, she had to learn what computational
linguistics is, what it does it, how does
it and why.
