Artificially Intelligent Machines Gain Ground
Aug. 13 -- If the people of Seattle seemed a little uncomfortable last week, they had good reason. The word on the street is that they’re on the way out.
From Aug. 2-10, Seattle’s Washington State Convention and Trade Center hosted two major events in the world of artificial intelligence: the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAA), and RoboCup 2001, a tournament featuring autonomous soccer-playing robots, sponsored by ICJAA.
Scientists from around the world converged on the city to showcase the latest advances in thinking machines. Judging by the research presented, journalists and commodities traders may be the first to go.
Reporter of the Future
Charles Callaway and James Lester, researchers at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, showed off an intelligent software system called Author that is already able to write convincing fairy tales.
The program, which was originally developed to help children overcome reading problems, generates new fairy tales by changing details about the characters, props, and plot in existing stories. When given a story plan consisting of characters, scenes, and the order of events, Author will string these facts into sentence-like groups and automatically apply a series of logic rules to turn them into grammatically correct sentences.
Given a different set of story templates and a few years of work, Callaway and Lester said Author could be adapted to write newspaper stories.
The researchers told conference attendees that they foresee Author being joined with automated summarizers — programs that extract information from text — to create a robotic reporter that would scan news wires or government papers for the bare facts of a story.
Such programs already exist in basic form, said Daniel Marcu, a researcher at the Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California in Marina del Rey. But Author, Marcu said, is by far the best at generating readable prose, and the only one that can write stories more than a couple of paragraphs long.
