"Matthew Probert - The Mechanics of Human Conversation" - читать интересную книгу автора (Probert Matthew)

quickly if they are to be successful in their vocation.

During the spring and summer months of 1994 I conducted an experiment into
conversation. Participants were invited to contact a computer bulletin board
service. The participants generally were familiar with the phenomena of
bulletin boards, which are a computer system from which messages to other
callers may be left, and computer files exchanged. It is also common for
conversations to take place on-line between callers or a caller and the
operator of the host computer. This operator being known as a "systems
operator". The bulletin board in question was advertissed as a forum for
discussion into artificial intelligence. Participants were also informed that
the bulletin board would provide facilities for conversing with computer
personalities as well as the human operator. However, the particpants were not
informed when they would be conversing with which. On some occassions they
would instigate a conversation and it would be carried out with the human
operator, and at other times a computer program would respond to them.

The computer programs used for the experiment were programmed to simulate the
type of spontaneous conversation that would be expected to occur between two
parties who could predict what the other would say. When an unexpected stimuli
was received by the computer program, it would respond either by changing the
subject, or with a humourous indication of its confusion. While many
particpants realised after varying times that they were conversing with a
machine, more signifcant was the number of particpants who frequently mistook
the human operator for a machine.

The computer programs were frequently caught out by unexpected questions that
they had not been programmed to respond to, and as such they responded in an
incoherrent manner. This was detected by the more experienced human callers
quite quickly, although callers who had never conversed with a machine before
were still unaware that they were not talking to a human. More often the speed
at which the computer typed, and the regularity of its typing speed (it's body
language) gave the human caller an indication as to the mechanical nature than
the responses. Therefore, when speaking to a human operator with a similarly
fast and uniform typing rate the particpants mis-perceived the body language
to be that of a computer. From this we can see that conversation is not
restricted to word symbols. Inflexion in spoken conversation, typing speed in
teletype conversation and body movements in close contact conversation all
assist and hinder the perception process in putting meaning to the received
stimuli.


THE ANALYSIS PROCESS:

Having discussed the general picture of conversation I should like to turn
attention to a more detailed look at the analysis process that occurs. The
process of analysis of language is called "parsing" and the mechanisms used
are called "parsers". The two indistinct processes already mentioned may now
be examined in more detail. The first, the "spontaneous reaction" is very
quick analysis carried out by a mechanism called a "slot-and-frame parser".