MIT Professor Gives Language Lessons to Computers

There’s a scene in the 2008 movie Iron Man where Tony Stark, the film’s inventor-superhero, threatens to donate one of his robots to a city college. You can tell by its cowed response that the computerized assistant understands the connotation is decidedly negative. In real life, software can’t yet comprehend that kind of abstract scolding. Programmers refer to such banter as “natural language,” and it’s tricky for computers to get because of its ambiguity and dependence on context.

Regina Barzilay, an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is trying to make computers better listeners by making them play Civilization, a 20-year-old strategy game in which players build a city into an empire by vanquishing and absorbing neighboring cultures. A member of MIT’s Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Lab, Barzilay, 40, developed a software program that begins with no grasp of the game. The computer “reads” the manual and then keeps returning to it while playing. As it races through thousands of simulations, the computer learns to connect words in the directions (“attack,” “build,” “capture,” and “revolt”) as the game unfolds.