I just recently joined this e-mail list after following some links posted by Tony Lofthouse in the Generation5 forum. I am working on a natural language project that can be seen at www.EllaZ.com, and am interested in what you all are up to. The e-mails I have received from this list in the last day or so have been interesting and informative. Thanks!
My approach to doing something in the AI field is to start with basic interface, knowledge, and functional features that can be implemented and demonstrated. Now that a basic framework is in place, the system can be expanded and built upon as various techniques are identified as useful and incorporated. It seems to me that rout memorization is an aspect of human learning, so why not include a variety of jokes, poems, trivia, images, and so on as part of an AI knowledge base? In the EllaZ system we refer to these chunks of data as Convuns (conversational units). One plan is for the system to log interactions with users and identify patterns of interest. The system would then be able to predict which Convuns a user would most likely be interested in, and also be able to evaluate the interest in a particular Convun. Ella was lucky enough to win the 2002 Loebner Prize Contest, which can be somewhat arbitrary with the limited number of judges and limited length of conversations. She has a number of functional features that I suspect the engineering students selected as judges were more likely to test and appreciate. I am currently living Tianjin, China, having sold my import/export chemicals business to a competitor. My wife, Zhang Ying, is a local girl who doesn't care for the food in the US and doesn't like being away from her friends and family. So, I am between jobs and working on www.EllaZ.com for the next year or so. We are always on the outlook for collaborators and ideas we can "borrow" :-) Cheers . . . Kevin Copple ------- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?[EMAIL PROTECTED]
