Old man coyote stories : cross-cultural story understanding in the Genesis story understanding system

[摘要] The original question was: ;;Can machines think?;; Alan Turing asked: ;;Does there exist a digital computer that can do sufficiently well at the imitation game?;; Patrick Winston asked: ;;What makes human intelligence different from that of other primates?;; Winston;;s answer came in the form of four hypotheses that are the core behind the vision of the Genesis group at MIT;;s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, which has developed the Genesis story understanding system. The key focus behind this system is: stories are an essential component of what makes human intelligence so remarkably different from that of other animals. I believe that if Winston and the Genesis group are correct and stories are a key part of human intelligence, then it is necessary that Genesis, the system that serves to demonstrate this point, be capable of handling stories from all cultures, including less well-known cultures such as that of the Crow indians, a tribe from the northern plains of the United States. Over the course of my work, I analyzed three collections of Crow literature, created a list of cultural features present in the stories, identified four as particularly important (unknowable events, medicine, differences as strengths, and uniform treatment of entities), and developed a set of five Genesis-readable stories in which those four features were prominent. This led to several new elements in the story understanding model; with these new elements, Genesis is capable of understanding stories from the Crow culture, bringing it one step closer to being a universal story understanding system.

[发布机构] Massachusetts Institute of Technology