Examining Linguistic Behavior of a Virtual Museum Guide

Abstract

As artificial intelligence that uses natural language processing becomes more prevalent, analyzing such software so that it maximally understands us holds all the more significance. Despite the high accuracy at which recurrent neural networks can predict, say, the next word in a sentence, they function differently than a human brain. Given that the sources of difficulty encountered by a natural language processing software may not be intuitive to a human, searching for patterns among its errors provides insight as to where software can be improved. Additionally, given that language is productive, humans interacting with natural language processing technology can produce an unlimited variety of stimuli. When a stimulus is as unpredictable as a human prompted to ask whatever they want, the response it yields reveals how natural language processing software handles variability. At the Center of Science and Industry (COSI), a science museum in Columbus, Ohio, researchers from the Ohio State University have developed an interactive avatar that uses natural language processing. In this context, an avatar can be defined as a human-like bot created to interact with users. Visitors can ask the avatar questions related to linguistics, computer science, and exhibits at the museum. The avatar consists of both an animated visual component and its artificial intelligence software, which processes speech as input and produces a response accordingly. In this case, the artificial intelligence used to process language is a recurrent neural network, pretrained on a large corpus of general English text, then subsequently trained on a smaller corpus of text pertaining to computer science, linguistics, and COSI exhibits. My research focuses on the effectiveness of the avatar's responses.No embargoAcademic Major: Linguistic