Giving Computers the Gift of Gab

Endowing Computers With the Gift of Gab from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute "Despite the power of computers to crunch numbers with unfathomable speed and perform quadrillions of calculations per second, the machines are still quite primitive in their ability to truly understand human language.

"This is a glaring digital deficiency that Nicholas Cassimatis, assistant professor in the Department of Cognitive Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, is looking to solve. He is leading a multi-university team of researchers to develop unified theories of language and cognition that aim to allow more meaningful linguistic interaction between humans and computers. Only by better understanding the nature of human language, Cassimatis said, can we develop computational systems with human-level language abilities."