He can’t beat us. But still. But an artificial intelligence (AI) program developed by scientists at IBM is so good at debating against humans that it may be a matter of time before we can compete.
Project Debater, an autonomous debating system that has been developing for several years, is able to argue against people in a meaningful way, take sides in a debate on a chosen topic, and make a strong argument for why whose opinion is correct. .
The AI, described in a new study published in Nature, he is not yet at the point where he can gather human argumentative logic, but a public demonstration of his abilities in 2019 showed how far his rational approach to reasoning has come.
In a demonstration debate against Harish Natarajan, an expert debater, Project Debater revealed that it was able to argue a complex issue (whether to subsidize preschool for families), and present a case that ‘support the argument.
(IntelligenceSquared / YouTube Debates)
Within natural language processing, the ability to do this involves something called argument mining, in which AI parses a lot of different information, looking to link relevant sections together.
As for Project Debater, it has been archived around 400 million news articles, from which it can now close opening statements, comments and summaries on a range of about 100 topics of discussion.
While the system still needs updating – and is not yet at the point where it can match a human debate expert – the majority of viewers who overestimated -writing of Project Debater arguments heavily, ranking AI performance as good in the debates.
That is an achievement, given that the technological challenges of argument mining for this kind of reason were considered almost impossible even for modern AI just ten years ago.
“Since then, a combination of technical advances in AI and increased maturity in argument technology engineering, coupled with high commercial demand, has led to a rapid expansion of the field,” explains argument technology researcher Chris Reed from the University of Dundee in the UK, who were not involved in the study, in a statement on the research.
“More than 50 laboratories around the world are working on the problem, including teams at every major software organization.”
Of course, in recent years we’ve seen AIs surpass human capabilities many times over in the world of gameplay, but argument mining is a more complex endeavor, given the sheer amount of information that it needs to be analyzed and then linked together.
“Debate represents a major mental activity in the human mind, requiring a broad arsenal of language comprehension and simultaneous application of language generation abilities, many of which have only been partially studied from a computational perspective ( as individual actions), and certainly not in a holistic way, ”the researchers, led by lead researcher Noam Slonim explain in their study.
“Therefore, it appears that a system of autonomous debate is beyond the reach of previous language research efforts.”
While Project Debater represents a major step forward, the field is not yet at the stage where AIs can perform this reasoning task better than humans can.
The team says that debate is still effectively outside the ‘comfort zone’ of AI systems, and that novel paradigms need to be developed before we can see machines harnessing people’s sexual argumentative skill in complex topics. and contingent.
The results are reported in Nature.