TS+Computers+EG

If a computer could master language as well as a child does, the feat would rank as one of the greatest technological achievements of our time. But so far, computers fall far short of the capability. “How do children learn the language of their parents with seemingly effortless ease?” asks Partha Niyogi, Associate Professor in Computer Science, Statistics and the Physical Science Collegiate Division. Linguists, psychologists and computer scientists specializing in artificial intelligence would all like to know how to answer that question. The computational analysis of how language evolves may well hold the answer, suggests Niyogi, who is completing a book on the topic. That is because children imperfectly learn the language of their parents. “If language acquisition is perfect, then language is successfully transmitted from generation to generation. You would expect that languages would remain stable over time. They wouldn’t change,” he said. But languages do change with time. Linguists and philosophers have known since the 19th century about the relationship between language learning and language evolution. But only in recent years have researchers such as Niyogi developed the computational tools to quantify this relationship. Language lends itself to computational analysis because it is a formal system, Niyogi said. Its words, phrases and sentences conform to a set of rules. Niyogi’s computational method for studying language evolution combines a given language theory with a given learning theory, both numerically expressed, and deduces their evolutionary consequences. “What we want to study is the interplay between learning by individuals and evolution in populations,” he said, just as biologists study how the transmission of genes from parent to child affects population genetics.

[|SIRS]

[|Librarian's Index to the Internet]

[|Internet Public Library]

[|HomeworkNYC]

Computers affecting languages

1. How has computers affect people? - Has computers affect the reading of the internet books or not? - Has computers affect languages in New York city? - Has computers affect learning different types of languages in New York city? - Has it affect letters and the alphabet in many languages? - Has typing on the computers affecting translation and the ability to understand commutation online?

2. Why has computers affect commutation by understand text on the computer? - Has it affect other countries that resolve in trading online or not? What type of computers can expect differnt languages?

Ariticles:
commuations, reading, understanding
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