Machines certainly can acquire lots of information that is input by people or is detected by an external device that allows it to gather data. Moreover, machines do have many abilities to manipulate information as well.. even to the point beyond human capabilities like calculating the twentieth decimal digit of 'pi'.
Just like us, for a machine to speak, it is necessary to think or think what to speak. Language is an integral part of achieving a machine's Artificial Intelligence to the point of human level thought. That is why researchers are trying to create machines that understand a human language.
The hurdle of getting a machine to think like a human brain is a monumental task analogous to building an airplane that can fly.
Drawing upon the design specifications on boolean algebra founded by George Boole, today's machines understand only one language: binary. All of its processes can be reduced to electricity turning a machine's components on or off. This problem has aptly solved by programmers who eventually codified the meanings simple words(usually in English) to facilitate programming. This kind of machine language is called high-level machine language. Nevertheless, machines with this high-level language have a very limited understanding of the commands it was programmed. Obviously, high-level programming languages are by no means a conscious attempt to produce artificial intelligence, but it was a precursor to it.
In theory, the machine would have a sentence entered into its memory, find comparable words in a translation dictionary, rearrange the newly translated words to form a grammatically-correct sentence, and then output the translated sentence.
The main focus in Artificial Intelligence today is getting a machine to recognize, make sense and recreate in what it sees and hears.
Today, programmers have developed more sophisticated language-processing techniques. One of the first steps to understanding a sentence is to understand its words individually. An approach to this problem is to build a dictionary for the machine to access. However, a problem in this method is that the definitions of a word may contain words the machine doesn't understand as well so it must look those words up. Soon, the machine runs into problems when either it can't find a word without a definition or the word refers to a term that had directed the machine to the current word in the first place.
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A better way for a machine to understand language is called sentence-parsing. In this method, a machine has a dictionary as well, but it is limited to defining words in terms of the part of speech it fit into a sentence grammatically.
Thus, a machine can at least understanding which words are nouns, verbs, prepositions, etc. which is divided under phrases in a sentences such as noun phrases(NP), verb phrases(VP), and prepositional phrases(PP). This categorization allows a machine to grasp the structure of the sentence and how the words and phrases that make it up relate to one another--another step towards understanding a sentence. For example, the sentence, "Arun gives a present to Bhagavan" can be parsed as:
Abbreviations To Parsed Parts
S=sentence
NP=noun phrase
VP=verb phrase
PP=prepositional phrase N=noun
V=verb
P=preposition
D=determiner
lang_ex1.gif (3853 bytes)
Unfortunately, there are times when sentences can be parsed in different ways that affect its meaning. This is especially true when the sentence is complexly structured. There is an example of the multitude of ways to parse a complex sentence that produces a variety of meanings.
Although, the application of artificial intelligence already play partially vital role in many professional areas, from medical science to car manufacturing, the real bang of artificial intelligence will only be felt by society when an embedded artificial intellegence in a machine which can understand verbal commands and also can output equally understandable verbal expressions and become a part of the public's lives.
To many this is like being in the magical world.. but think of the years ahead of current time, there will be machines walking all over the places with full capabilities to be able to engage with you for a (pleasant) man-machine chat.
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