Human-Like Neural Networks Make Computers Better Conversationalists

HAL 9000, depicted as a glowing red "eye," was the frighteningly charismatic computer protagonist in Stanley Kubrick's 1968 movie "2001 Space Odyssey." (Credit: Screengrab from YouTube If you’ve ever tried to hold a conversation with a chatbot like CleverBot, you know how quickly the conversation turns to nonsense, no matter how hard you try to keep it together. But now, a research team led by Bruno Golosio, assistant professor of applied physics at Università di Sassari in Italy, has taken a significant step toward improving human-to-computer conversation. Golosio and colleagues built an artificial neural network, called ANNABELL, that aims to emulate the large-scale structure of human working memory in the brain — and its ability to hold a conversation is eerily human-like.

Natural Language Processing