The talking (and listening) Gecko

I was reading this book today ("Speech and Language Processing - An Introduction to Natural Language Processing and Computational Linguistics and Speech Recognition" by Daniel Jurafsky & James H. Martin) and would like to share a few interesting tid bits I gathered in the opening chapter..

1. "... regardless of what people believe or know about the inner workings of computers, they talk about them and interact with them as social entities. People act towards computers as if they were people, they are polite to them, treat them as team members, and expect among other things that computers should be able to understand their needs, and be capable of interacting with them naturally" [doesn't that make my job simpler, this software should only understand polite commands and not the rude, mean ones :P ]

2. ELIZA (probably the first cool NLP application, written back in 1966) actually managed to fool people into believing that it were a Rogerian psychotherapist by simply rephrasing sentences inputted by them.

"ELIZA's deep relevance to Turing's ideas is that many people who interacted with ELIZA came to believe that it really understood them and their problems. Indeed, Weizenbaum (1976) notes that many of these people continued to believe in ELIZA's abilities even after the program's operation was explained to them."

[check this for a sample conversation with ELIZA : http://www.stanford.edu/group/SHR/4-2/text/dialogues.html]

The future looks all hunky dory, doesn't it...

Btw my firefox too is showing some signs of being talkative, the last I heard was

"
(firefox:19328): Gdk-WARNING **: XID collision, trouble ahead

(firefox:19328): Gdk-WARNING **: XID collision, trouble ahead

(firefox:19328): Gdk-WARNING **: XID collision, trouble ahead
"