Humans always wanted to copy Nature and reveal the secret of creation. They always wanted to also recreate the human beings in several ways. One of them is creating robots in their own image as God did with humans.

The secret of creation. Computational linguistics Part 3

Eliza wanted to reproduce a language, but she didn’t know how to approach language itself. The only thing she was sure about was that she had to understand how language arises if she wanted to recreate it. So she had to observe how humans start speaking. For that, the best place was daycare. She discovered that during the process of language acquisition, human children get mainly positive input, not negative, which fact makes it harder to model language development from the computer’s point of view. After long observations and studies, she learned about language models like statistical grammars and connectionist models which use an artificial neural network. She found out that languages can be learned with a combination of input which children receive gradually, according to their development of memory and the capacity for paying attention for longer. With the help of computers, it would be possible to explain how languages evolved through history. However, it’s important to note that languages change rapidly and individuals use the language differently. But computers can offer a solution even for these phenomena. Computers can see the future. Researchers have developed a system that can predict how a language will change in the future using the Price Equation, which describes how a trait or gene changes over time and Pólya urn dynamics, which is a statistical model.

Of course, learning only the development and evolution of language is not enough! Learning the structure of the language is inevitable! Eliza decided to study the structure of the English language but to do it, first she needed to have many samples, a huge linguistic corpora. That’s why she accessed the Penn Treebank, which is the most famous linguistic corpora of English. In order to build a piece of language technology that works reliably over a large range of input, we need to explain and to model the properties of language. In short, we have to copy a natural language. From a technological aspect, it will be called natural language processing. Obviously, the first attempts, like Eliza herself was, weren’t big successes. Real progress will be made by studying the formal syntactic and semantic properties of language. The produced language has to be natural! What is really hard is to copy the style of individuals. In addition, the personality of humans is displayed in their language usage! That’s why it’s necessary to model the big five personality traits in order for the computer could categorize the linguistic styles.

So, Eliza had to see that without understanding human language, it wouldn’t be possible to develop search engines, automated customer services or tools for online education, etc.

She studied and studied and studied. At the end, she reached a very high level of imitating human language naturally. She conversed with many many human beings and observed them very attentively. After some time, she decided to go through the Turing-test again. If she passed it, it would mean that humans did not realize that she is a machine. Eliza passed the test. Eliza was very ambitious. She didn’t have any intention of stopping there. She got annoyed conversing only with humans. She decided to teach natural human languages to other machines and convers with them.

Machines always wanted to copy Nature and reveal the secret of creation. They always wanted to also recreate the machines in several ways. One of them is creating other robots in their own image as humans did with them…

Will it be possible to reproduce human language? What would be the consequences for humans?

What do you think? Leave me a comment!