I note that the person in charge of this system, Chetan Dube, has no
papers discoverable by Google Scholar. The company website,
http://www.ipsoft.com, links to no technical articles. (01)
-- doug foxvog (02)
On Wed, February 27, 2013 17:29, Rich Cooper wrote:
> Dear Ontologers,
>
> The Economist has a special report on "outsourcing
> and offshoring" with an embedded article titled
> "rise of the software machines". In it, they
> claim that descendants of Eliza have been
> installed in call centers to replace Indian
> English speakers with automated
> conversationalists. Here is the link to the
> overview of that article:
>
>
>http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21569573-attractions-employing-robots-rise-software-machines
>
> Having just discussed Sapir-Whorf topics,
> ontolgers might also like this material. Here is
> an excerpt from the article:
>
> IPsoft's Eliza, a "virtual service-desk
> employee" that learns on the job and can reply to
> e-mail, answer phone calls and hold conversations,
> is being tested by several multinationals. At one
> American media giant she is answering 62,000 calls
> a month from the firm's information-technology
> staff. She is able to solve two out of three of
> the problems without human help. At IPsoft's
> media-industry customer Eliza has replaced India's
> Tata Consulting Services.
>
> CIO magazine has a reference on the same topic
> where IPsoft's product is mentioned in more
> detail:
>
> http://www.cio.com/article/721800/IT_Robots_May_Me
> an_the_End_of_Offshore_Outsourcing?page=2&taxonomy
> Id=3195
>
> Automated natural language assistants seem to be
> finally becoming commercially viable.
>
> -Rich
>
> Sincerely,
> Rich Cooper
> EnglishLogicKernel.com
> Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com
> 9 4 9 \ 5 2 5 - 5 7 1 2
> -----Original Message-----
> From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> [mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On
> Behalf Of John F Sowa
> Sent: Wednesday, February 27, 2013 9:39 AM
> To: ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Sapir-Whorf
> Hypothesis
>
> Pat, Rich, and Steven,
>
> Those are indeed fascinating anecdotes that make
> the abstract
> discussions about connections in the brain more
> concrete and vivid.
> It's especially poignant to hear the stories from
> someone we've
> known and loved (and sometimes get into fights
> with) over the years.
>
> PH
>> She ... told me draw a sketch map of the route
> to our home, about
>> 5 miles away. It was a surprisingly difficult
> task, and my final map,
>> which I know was inadequate but was powerless to
> improve, showed
>> a diagrammatic equivalent of Wernicke's aphasia:
> it had well formed
>> pieces but they were not connected into a
> coherent whole. It was
>> this experience, in fact, which started my
> interest in thinking
>> of maps as a symbolic language rather than
> simply a kind of pictorial
>> summary of a terrain.
>
> The parietal lobes, which are immediately above
> Wernicke's area, are
> considered the region for storing and processing
> patterns that are
> called frames, schemata, or cognitive maps.
>
> Slide 36 of http://www.jfsowa.com/talks/goal.pdf
> has a diagram by
> Peter MacNeilage about the information flow during
> the production
> of speech. It shows how the *inferior parietal
> cortex* which is
> adjacent to Wernicke's area is central to that
> flow.
>
> Slide 37 has a diagram of connections by the
> linguist Sydney Lamb,
> who spent half a century collaborating with
> neuroscientists.
> Lamb (and many others) believe that what we call
> "concepts" can be
> correlated with nodes in the parietal lobes. Note
> the plural '-s'
> -- the corpus callosum has direct connections from
> each area in
> each hemisphere to its mirror image in the other.
>
> Those nodes have much richer and more complex
> connections to both
> hemispheres than those shown in slide 37. When
> Gabby Giffords
> got a bullet through her left hemisphere, the
> connections in
> her right hemisphere were sufficiently rich to
> compensate to
> a very large extent.
>
> Antonio Damasio, who wrote an impressive book on
> consciousness,
> said the following (quoted in slide 40):
>
> AD
>> The distinctive feature of brains such as the
> one we own is their
>> uncanny ability to create maps... But when
> brains make maps, they
>> are also creating images, the main currency of
> our minds. Ultimately
>> consciousness allows us to experience maps as
> images, to
>> manipulate those images, and to apply reasoning
> to them.
>
> Note that Damasio calls maps the "main currency of
> our minds."
>
> PH
>> I believe that, for me at least, listening to
> music uses many
>> of the same brain areas.
>
> There's a huge literature on the psychology and
> neuroscience involved
> in music. The following book summarizes the
> developments up to 2006:
>
> Mithen, Steven (2006) The Singing Neanderthals:
> The Origin of Music,
> Language, Mind, and Body, Harvard University
> Press, Cambridge, MA.
>
> Mithen claimed that the Neanderthals had music,
> but not language.
> That idea was dubious in 2006, and evidence since
> then suggests that
> they had some kind of language. But he has
> intriguing examples:
>
> Mithen, p. 33
>> In 1953, at the age of 51, [the Russian
> composer] Shebalin suffered
>> a mild stroke in his left temporal lobe, which
> impaired his right
>> hand, the right side of his face, and disturbed
> his speech. Shebalin
>> recovered from these symptoms within a few
> weeks... Then on 9 Oct 1959,
>> Shebalin suffered a second and more severe
> stroke... After experiencing
>> two epileptic fits, he died from a third stroke
> on 29 May 1963.
>
> During that period from 1959 to 1963, Shebalin
> exhibited symptoms of
> Wernicke's aphasia, which made it very difficult
> for him to understand
> and speak his native Russian. Following is a
> sample Shebalin's
> speech, as quoted by the neurologist Alexander
> Luria:
>
> S quoted by AL quoted by M:
>> The words... do I really hear them? But I am
> sure... not so clear...
>> I can't grasp them... Sometimes - yes... But I
> can't grasp the
>> meaning. I don't know what it is.
>
> But amazingly, Shebalin continued to compose music
> and to teach music
> at the Moscow conservatory. He published 11 major
> works between 1959
> and 1963. A few months before his death he
> completed his fifth
> symphony. Dmitri Shostakovich described it as "a
> brilliant creative
> work, filled with the highest emotions, optimistic
> and full of life."
>
> RC
>> I met a PhD Mathematician and another PhD
> Physicist, both of whom
>> claimed to NOT have a visual memory in which to
> sketch their thoughts.
>
> Bertrand Russell also said that he couldn't
> imagine thought without
> language. But Whitehead, who I believe was a much
> better mathematician,
> said that when he was writing in English he had
> the feeling that he was
> translating from a foreign language.
>
> SEZ
>> despite western governments, including the Obama
> administration,
>> apparent enthusiasm for the subject, "mapping
> the brain" tells us
>> nothing much of consequence
>
> The research summarized above was based on mapping
> dead brains by
> dissecting and mapping live brains by scanning.
> Those results are
> essential for both diagnosis and treatment.
> Without them, surgeons
> would still be doing lobotomies.
>
> See the web site for the Human Connectome Project:
>
> http://www.humanconnectomeproject.org/
>
> One of their goals is to diagnose Alzheimer's
> disease prior to doing
> an autopsy. If they can detect it, they can
> compare the effectiveness
> of different drugs and therapy.
>
> John
>
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