Chatting With a Computer?

We all chat on instant messaging applications like Google Talk and Yahoo Messenger, but have you ever had multiple conversations going with your messenger friends at the same time and found it difficult to manage? Well we can manage about five conversations simultaneously but anything more and it becomes difficult. Have you ever wished a chat bot could handle some of your conversations while you finish up with the others?

Well it turns out that handling conversations for computers is hard because question answering is not easy for them. Computers programs are excellent at search. All of us know how fast Google is able to retrieve documents. Search works with the computer indexing all the documents available on the web and as soon as you fire a query, by initiating a search through this index to find documents matching your query. In this the whole web is a library in which each document is indexed by the words it contains.

Question answering is harder because the computer now has to find a specific answer to your query. Say you want to know what weather is good for growing grapes. Google can find you all documents containing grapes, weather and grow as keywords, but it cant give you the answer. Worse if you wanted to know what weather is not good for growing grapes, search would most probably return the same set of documents. Also ambiguity is hard to figure for computers. "Did you shoot Dana?" Are you referring to shooting your friend, making a movie called Dana, then there could be many Dana's so which Dana? Humans also use sarcasm and humour which is very hard for computers to understand.

Still people have attempted to build chatbots and the quality of chatbots has been steadily improving. While the IBM Watson system that will compete on Jeopardy is not a chatbot, it still has to learn how to answer questions posed to it. There is the expectation that this system will spur dialog technology and in the next few years we will start seeing chatbots that could take your place in chatting with your friends on instant messengers.

Watson: Computers vs Humans at Jeopardy

IBM is building a question answering system to take on humans at Jeopardy.

Jeopardy contestants need to know a broad range of topics like history, literature, science, pop culture, among many others. Jeopardy has a unique answer-and-question format in which contestants are presented with clues in the form of answers, and must phrase their responses in the form of a question. The contestants need to provide accurate responses at high speed based on clues that involve analyzing subtle meaning, irony, riddles, and other complexities. Watson the computer that will play Jeopardy will learn to do all this.


Watson will be an advanced Question Answering system that can rival human's in their ability to answer natural language questions.

In 1950 Alan Turing had set the test for intelligence to be the ability of a machine to fool a human interrogator into thinking that it is human. Turing proposed that the human interrogator hold a text based natural language conversation with a human and a machine, where both the human and the machine try to appear human. If at the end of the conversation the interrogator is unable to reliably decide which is the human and which is the machine then he said the machine must be considered intelligent.

Interestingly Turing had predicted that such systems will be built by 2000. Of course we are in 2009 and we still dont have such systems. Could Watson be the first step towards such a system? In Turing's test the questions could be on any topic, but Watson will limit itself to the specific format of Jeopardy.

Some people may argue that afterall humans will program the computer so the computer cannot be considered intelligent. Okay here is my counter to that: In 1997 Deep Blue (IBMs supercomputer) beat Garry Kasparov in chess matchplay. The people who programmed deep blue were five computer science researchers and one chess international master, who together would have been no match for Garry Kasparov. Obviously the computer added that something which could defeat Kasparov?