@ -20,7 +20,6 @@ This is possible because someone wrote a computer program to do this. A few deca
At this point, you may be remembering school classes where the teacher covered the parts of grammar in a sentence. In some countries, students are taught grammar and linguistics as a dedicated subject, but in many, these topics are included as part of learning a language: either your first language in primary school (learning to read and write) and perhaps a second language in post-primary, or high school. Don't worry if you are not an expert at differentiating nouns from verbs or adverbs from adjectives!
If you struggle with the difference between the *simple present* and *present progressive*, you are not alone. This is a challenging thing for many people, even native speakers of a language. The good news is that computers are really good at applying formal rules, and you will learn to write code that can *parse* a sentence as well as a human. The greater challenge you will examine later is understanding the *meaning*, and *sentiment*, of a sentence.
## Prerequisites
For this lesson, the main prerequisite is being able to read and understand the language of this lesson. There are no math problems or equations to solve. While the original author wrote this lesson in English, it is also translated into other languages, so you could be reading a translation. There are examples where a number of different languages are used (to compare the different grammar rules of different languages). These are *not* translated, but the explanatory text is, so the meaning should be clear.
@ -49,7 +48,9 @@ The history of trying to make computers understand human language goes back deca
The idea for this came from a party game called *The Imitation Game* where an interrogator is alone in a room and tasked with determining which of two people (in another room) are male and female respectively. The interrogator can send notes, and must try to think of questions where the written answers reveal the gender of the mystery person. Of course, the players in the other room are trying to trick the interrogator by answering questions in such as way as to mislead or confuse the interrogator, whilst also giving the appearance of answering honestly.
In the 1960's an MIT scientist called *Joseph Weizenbaum* developed [*Eliza*](https:/wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA), a computer 'therapist' that would ask the human questions and give the appearance of understanding their answers. However, while Eliza could parse a sentence and identify certain grammatical constructs and keywords so as to give a reasonable answer, it could not be said to *understand* the sentence. If Eliza was presented with a sentence following the format "**I am** <u>sad</u>" it might rearrange and substitute words in the sentence to form the response "How long have **you been**<u>sad</u>". This gave the impression that Eliza understood the statement and was asking a follow-on question, whereas in reality, it was changing the tense and adding some words. If Eliza could not identify a keyword that it had a response for, it would instead give a random response that could be applicable to many different statements. Eliza could be easily tricked, for instance if a user wrote "**You are** a <u>bicycle</u>" it might respond with "How long have **I been** a <u>bicycle</u>?", instead of a more reasoned response.
In the 1960's an MIT scientist called *Joseph Weizenbaum* developed [*Eliza*](https:/wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA), a computer 'therapist' that would ask the human questions and give the appearance of understanding their answers. However, while Eliza could parse a sentence and identify certain grammatical constructs and keywords so as to give a reasonable answer, it could not be said to *understand* the sentence. If Eliza was presented with a sentence following the format "**I am** <u>sad</u>" it might rearrange and substitute words in the sentence to form the response "How long have **you been**<u>sad</u>".
This gave the impression that Eliza understood the statement and was asking a follow-on question, whereas in reality, it was changing the tense and adding some words. If Eliza could not identify a keyword that it had a response for, it would instead give a random response that could be applicable to many different statements. Eliza could be easily tricked, for instance if a user wrote "**You are** a <u>bicycle</u>" it might respond with "How long have **I been** a <u>bicycle</u>?", instead of a more reasoned response.
> Note: You can read the original description of [Eliza](https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/1966/1/13317-elizaa-computer-program-for-the-study-of-natural-language-communication-between-man-and-machine/abstract) published in 1966 if you have an ACM account. Alternately, read about Eliza on [wikipedia](https://wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA)
@ -108,6 +109,7 @@ One possible solution to the task is [here](solution/bot.py)
2. What features would the bot need to be more effective?
3. If a bot could really 'understand' the meaning of a sentence, would it need to 'remember' the meaning of previous sentences in a conversation too?
---
## 🚀Challenge
Choose one of the "stop and consider" elements above and either try to implement them in code or write a solution on paper using pseudocode.
@ -123,7 +125,6 @@ Take a look at the references below as further reading opportunities.
1. Schubert, Lenhart, "Computational Linguistics", *The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy* (Spring 2020 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2020/entries/computational-linguistics/>.
2. Princeton University "About WordNet." [WordNet](https://wordnet.princeton.edu/). Princeton University. 2010.
Jen Looper
3 years ago