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October 30, 2005
Eliza and Irregular Verbs
Eliza isn't that bad at having a normal conversation. Most of the conversation consisted of me telling her information about myself, and never vice versa. Whenever I would ask her a question she would respond with another question, but other than that she seemed like a normal person to me.
The one thing that gave her away though was her use of irregular verbs. You can tell that she was programmed to repeat what you say by replacing the "I" with "you," and this would normally work. For example, if I were to say "I love snow," she would respond with "you love snow." However, when I used the verb "to be," she responded with "you am from Hanover." Eliza cannot conjugate irregular verbs like we can because that would involve programming each individual form of the verb. It is amazing that our brains are able to do this programming, having the capacity to store so much information.
After talking to Eliza, I talked to SmarterChild to see if he had the same problem with irregular verbs. SmarterChild was able to correctly conjugate the verb "to be" so that he could respond to me with "you are..." Perhaps SmarterChild has all of the irregular verbs programmed into him, or perhaps he just has a few commonly used ones, such as "to be." Either way, his ability to use this verb correctly shows a higher level of linguistic knowledge that has been acheived by computers.
Posted by lcissullivan at October 30, 2005 12:38 PM