radin4eto0
10-23-2011, 18:37
Привет, нужна ми е помощ по английски език! Ако някой може да направи обобщение на този текст...нещо като "summary" .Благодаря,предварително!Т ябва ми за утре! :)
A computer walks into a bar...no,hang on,why did the mainframe computer cross the road? Please,don't groan. Information Technology (IT) humour doesn't work very well. Computers don't do jokes and the people who understand computers aren't famous for being a load of laughs either. But Dr Binsted, an expert in Artificial Intelligence (AL), plans to change that. If her project succeeds, your computer of the future could be swapping puns (jokes on word play) and wisecracks with you faster than a New York cab driver.
Binsted is one of the speakers on humour, art and the brain, at the Festival of Art and the Mind, in England. She will unveil a computer program called "WISCRAIC" (Witty Idiomatic Sentence Creation Revealing Ambiguity in Context) which will entertain the audiance with its stock of clever jokes. However, since examples include 'The book thief was caught read-handed instead of 'red-handed', it's obvious that Binsted's cyber comedian cannot be relied upon for its ability to make people laugh. But that is one reason why the project is so interesting.The fact that Wiscraic and his punning companion Jape (Joke Analysis Production Engine) find even basic humour so hard, despite access to vast language databases, is a vivid demonstration of what a difficult thing humour is.
They are certainly nowhere near answering the most fundamental question - why do humans beings laugh and make jokes at all? Why is it that whenever two or three people are gathered together, we smile and send out a series of short noises, each about 75 milliseconds long, repeated at regular intervals? One rather surprising answer is social dominance.
When resercher Professor Provinee, at the University of Maryland, eavesdropped in clubs and bars to find exactly what happens when people laugh, he discovered that it is something women do in response to men. When talking to men, women will laugh 127 per cent more than their male audiance, while men talking to a female audiance will laugh seven per cent less than their audiance. 'Laughter like many other social activities, is connected with status and the desire of the male to impress. 'Provine says. 'Both male and female listeners laugh more when a man is speaking, but in neither case do the jokes have to be any good.
But when we laugh at something that is funny, what goes on in our brains? Understanding this is the ultimate dream of neuroscience because while we can locate memories, speech and even religious experiences in the brain, jokes turn out to be even more complex. Neuroscientists have known for some years that if you damage the right side of your brain, story-telling jokes of the 'Man walks into a bar' variety are lost on you - but comedy based on clumsy actions or embarrassing situations is guaranteed a laugh. When subjects were recently put in a scanner at the Institute of Neurology in London and told a popular joke an area at the back of their frontal lobes was activathed. But a rather different picture emerged when researchers at the institute told subjects puns or what they called 'semantic jokes' - 'Why don't sharks bite lawyers?' 'Professional courtesy.' While both types amused the part of the brain which deals with reward and control, they arrived there via different routes. the puns went through an area that controls speech (the Broca's), while the 'semantic' jokes went through the temporal lobes.
So it's obvious that humour is, in fact, a serious matter, with a strong sacial dimension that needs a surprising amount of brain power and a willindness to break rules. Attempting to programe these requirements into a computer sounds unrealistic at best. 'Its true that in science fiction robots can usually do everything - exept make jokes', Binsted says, 'but one of the aims of AL is to model what humans do and to replicate it'. She defends Wiscraic's playground jokes with an analogy about computer - composed music. 'It goes all the way from the sophisticated music of Bethoven down to short, simple tunes in adverts and right now we are still at the advertising end! But it's a start. If computers are going to have to do humour. 'What's intriguing is just how unsuccessful the computer is - 'The friendly gardener had thyme ( a garden herb, as opposed to time) for the women' - compared with real thing, like Groucho Marx's 'I have had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it'. Why exactly one works perfectly and the others make everyone groan is the kind of questions that keeps academics in work for decades.
But already Binsted's joking computer has its fans in at least one pplace where language is highly valued. It is currently being used to teach English to Japanese students who can chat with screen. The program makes a joke like the 'friendly gardener' one and then deconstructs it to explain the idiomatic use of the word 'time'. 'We've found that students remember more and keep wprking longer when the screen throws up the occasional joke', Binsted says.
A computer walks into a bar...no,hang on,why did the mainframe computer cross the road? Please,don't groan. Information Technology (IT) humour doesn't work very well. Computers don't do jokes and the people who understand computers aren't famous for being a load of laughs either. But Dr Binsted, an expert in Artificial Intelligence (AL), plans to change that. If her project succeeds, your computer of the future could be swapping puns (jokes on word play) and wisecracks with you faster than a New York cab driver.
Binsted is one of the speakers on humour, art and the brain, at the Festival of Art and the Mind, in England. She will unveil a computer program called "WISCRAIC" (Witty Idiomatic Sentence Creation Revealing Ambiguity in Context) which will entertain the audiance with its stock of clever jokes. However, since examples include 'The book thief was caught read-handed instead of 'red-handed', it's obvious that Binsted's cyber comedian cannot be relied upon for its ability to make people laugh. But that is one reason why the project is so interesting.The fact that Wiscraic and his punning companion Jape (Joke Analysis Production Engine) find even basic humour so hard, despite access to vast language databases, is a vivid demonstration of what a difficult thing humour is.
They are certainly nowhere near answering the most fundamental question - why do humans beings laugh and make jokes at all? Why is it that whenever two or three people are gathered together, we smile and send out a series of short noises, each about 75 milliseconds long, repeated at regular intervals? One rather surprising answer is social dominance.
When resercher Professor Provinee, at the University of Maryland, eavesdropped in clubs and bars to find exactly what happens when people laugh, he discovered that it is something women do in response to men. When talking to men, women will laugh 127 per cent more than their male audiance, while men talking to a female audiance will laugh seven per cent less than their audiance. 'Laughter like many other social activities, is connected with status and the desire of the male to impress. 'Provine says. 'Both male and female listeners laugh more when a man is speaking, but in neither case do the jokes have to be any good.
But when we laugh at something that is funny, what goes on in our brains? Understanding this is the ultimate dream of neuroscience because while we can locate memories, speech and even religious experiences in the brain, jokes turn out to be even more complex. Neuroscientists have known for some years that if you damage the right side of your brain, story-telling jokes of the 'Man walks into a bar' variety are lost on you - but comedy based on clumsy actions or embarrassing situations is guaranteed a laugh. When subjects were recently put in a scanner at the Institute of Neurology in London and told a popular joke an area at the back of their frontal lobes was activathed. But a rather different picture emerged when researchers at the institute told subjects puns or what they called 'semantic jokes' - 'Why don't sharks bite lawyers?' 'Professional courtesy.' While both types amused the part of the brain which deals with reward and control, they arrived there via different routes. the puns went through an area that controls speech (the Broca's), while the 'semantic' jokes went through the temporal lobes.
So it's obvious that humour is, in fact, a serious matter, with a strong sacial dimension that needs a surprising amount of brain power and a willindness to break rules. Attempting to programe these requirements into a computer sounds unrealistic at best. 'Its true that in science fiction robots can usually do everything - exept make jokes', Binsted says, 'but one of the aims of AL is to model what humans do and to replicate it'. She defends Wiscraic's playground jokes with an analogy about computer - composed music. 'It goes all the way from the sophisticated music of Bethoven down to short, simple tunes in adverts and right now we are still at the advertising end! But it's a start. If computers are going to have to do humour. 'What's intriguing is just how unsuccessful the computer is - 'The friendly gardener had thyme ( a garden herb, as opposed to time) for the women' - compared with real thing, like Groucho Marx's 'I have had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it'. Why exactly one works perfectly and the others make everyone groan is the kind of questions that keeps academics in work for decades.
But already Binsted's joking computer has its fans in at least one pplace where language is highly valued. It is currently being used to teach English to Japanese students who can chat with screen. The program makes a joke like the 'friendly gardener' one and then deconstructs it to explain the idiomatic use of the word 'time'. 'We've found that students remember more and keep wprking longer when the screen throws up the occasional joke', Binsted says.