Natural language parsing breakthrough?December 13, 2006
I saw this
link on Digg today. The Israeli company,
Linguistic Agents, claims to have made a "golden fleece" breakthrough in natural language parsing. I'm fascinated, and yet somewhat sceptical at the same time. Details are hard to come by. I've sent them an email requesting a demo of their software, so we'll see if they reply.
Update: I've had a brief look at this and I have mixed feelings. I think it's potentially quite a useful tool that could be used to create some intelligent applications, but simply breaking a sentence into nouns and verbs and attaching some singular/plural attributes to them is a relatively small step towards a truely intelligent human/computer interface. My username/password isn't working at the moment so hopefully I'll be able to spend some more time with this thing.
Idea: Programming language / environment for browser-based appsNovember 17, 2006
Imagine a programming language that can be run in the web browser (like JavaScript can), is faster than C yet platform independant, more expressive/powerful than any of the mainstream programming languages, object oriented, and has AJAX functionality built right in so that making remote function calls is as painless as making standard function calls. How that would revolutionize the Internet. Development costs would plummet and the functionality of of web apps would sky-rocket. (I wonder why Microsoft hasn't done this?) In this model, the web browser becomes even more of an "operating system", and the merits of writing standard Windows applications falls to an all time low. (Oh, maybe that's why)
2006 Loebner Prize WinnerOctober 3, 2006
Yesterday I came across the
Loebner Prize in Artificial Intelligence. [
Website] A bronze medal is awarded each year to the most life-like chatbot. I thought I'd take the 2006 winner for a spin. Her name is Joan. Can she interpret facts about the world and recall them upon request? Let's find out:
Daniel: "I have two sisters."
...
Daniel: "How many sisters do I have?"
Joan: "I have two eyes!"
Can't we do better than this in 2006?
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