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MIT Professor Gives Language Lessons to Computers

There’s a scene in the 2008 movie Iron Man where Tony Stark, the film’s inventor-superhero, threatens to donate one of his robots to a city college. You can tell by its cowed response that the computerized assistant understands the connotation is decidedly negative. In real life, software can’t yet comprehend that kind of abstract scolding. Programmers refer to such banter as “natural language,” and it’s tricky for computers to get because of its ambiguity and dependence on context.

Regina Barzilay, an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is trying to make computers better listeners by making them play Civilization, a 20-year-old strategy game in which players build a city into an empire by vanquishing and absorbing neighboring cultures. A member of MIT’s Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Lab, Barzilay, 40, developed a software program that begins with no grasp of the game. The computer “reads” the manual and then keeps returning to it while playing. As it races through thousands of simulations, the computer learns to connect words in the directions (“attack,” “build,” “capture,” and “revolt”) as the game unfolds.

The computer gets positive reinforcement—a higher score and a win—when it makes correct guesses about the meaning of words. When the computer loses, it traces back through its reading of the manual to see where its interpretation went wrong. A similar program without access to the manual won the game 46 percent of the time; after reading the instructions, Barzilay’s computer won 79 percent of the time.

Barzilay grew interested in natural-language processing in the early 1990s, as an undergraduate at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba, Israel. She was inspired in part by her own experience as a young emigrant from Moldavia who had to learn Hebrew and English. Just as she struggled at first to understand the use of articles such as “the,” which have no equivalent in her native Russian, logic-based computers have difficulties with the inconsistencies of natural language.

Research like Barzilay’s may help computers eventually interact with humans in a more normal way. “You’d like to be able to ask for the largest state bordering New York and have it come back with the answer, ‘Pennsylvania,’” says Dan Roth, a computer science professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who does work similar to Barzilay’s. “And what happens inside the computer is none of your business.” Barzilay has been pushing this line of work forward, he says, in part by using a more interesting and complex game. She has a grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to help robots understand natural language, not unlike those in Iron Man. As she puts it: “I want to see the computer benefit directly from human knowledge, without having a person in the middle who does a translation.”

评析：本文出自美国商业类主流杂志《商业周刊》。通过阅读标题，大致可以了解本篇的主旨是讲麻省理工的教授又有了新动作，给电脑上起了语言课。开篇边通过引用电 影《钢铁侠》中的场景，对比引出现实中的计算机是不可能像电影中那么智能的。随后第二段就讲到，麻省理工副教授Regina Barzilay在让计算机“听话”方面所做的研究。最后，总结了Barzilay的研究可以帮助计算机和人类以一种更加正常的方式进行交流，用她的话来 说，就是实现更好的人机交互，而不需要一个中间人来做翻译。

全文字数在460-470左右，篇幅不算太长，但是对于那些对科技不感兴趣的人来说，做到透彻理解还是较难。考试的时候，不妨根据考题，到原文中去定位， 提取关键信息，细枝末节则暂且忽略，只要不影响整体理解就行。而在平时，还是建议广大考生多关注这类文章，即使不敢兴趣，也要尝试去多阅读，多了解，广泛 涉猎，充实自己的知识储备总归不是坏事。要想考场发挥地游刃有余，就要通过平常不断的积累。

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