In a report from Honolulu, Hawaii, researchers are now teaching artificial intelligence systems how to take things “less literally.” This means helping the machines make “small talk” and teaching them understand human’s conversational phrases, tones and more.
According to the article, researchers are teaching artificial intelligence systems to understand the meanings of words not based on their dictionary definitions, but on their conversational meaning.
At a recent AI convention, AI developers unveiled a new type of AI that reads what a person is really saying, teaching it to really listen to what the human wants from it. Another developer created an AI that can “distinguish between literal and figurative phrases in writing,” according to the article.
According to a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, one important thing AI researchers are trying to implement in how facial tones change the meaning of words. This researcher for example compared how the meaning of the word “sick” changes depending on if someone is frowning and says it with a monotone voice as compared to someone who says a movie is “sick” smiling and talking about it enthusiastically.
The Carnegie Mellon researchers have taught an AI system to learn the meaning of human conversation by having the system watch YouTube videos to learn how facial expression can affect the meaning in language.
According to the article, many researchers all over the country are now studying this new form of helping AI understand language meaning that is always changing as humans develop new definitions for old words. There is new research on AI watching videos and looking at writing to differentiate between idioms, catch phrases and more.
Overall, I think this is a really cool experiment that researchers have been conducting because I know that all over the country language changes meaning and the same word can mean different things depending on where you say it. I think this could help AI become more realistic and knowledgeable in the future instead of just giving definitions from a large database. I would love to try this out and see if AI systems can determine the meaning of what I am saying and whether I mean it figuratively or literally. It is an interesting concept that will surely further the growing realm of AI research and how it can help people in the future.
Sources:
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/artificial-intelligence-learning-not-be-so-literal