An artificial intelligence (AI) program developed by IBM scientists is so good at debating arguments with humans that it's only a matter of time before we can't compete with it.
Project Debater, an autonomous debate system that has been in development for several years, is capable of disagreeing with a human in a meaningful way, participating in a discussion on a chosen topic, and making a strong case for why its point of view is the correct one.
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Artificial intelligence (AI), described in a new study published in Nature, is not yet at the point where it can overturn human reasoning, but a public demonstration of its capabilities in 2019 showed how far its artificial way of reasoning has come.
In a debate against debate champion Harish Natarajan, Project Debater revealed that he was able to formulate an argument on a complex topic involving preschool children and present a case to support the argument.
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Within natural language processing, the ability to do this involves what is called argument mining, in which an AI will analyze a huge amount of disparate information, looking to connect relevant sections together.
In the case of Project Debater, the project was fed an archive of around 400 million news articles, from which it can now compose introductory statements, rebuttals and summaries on a range of around 100 discussion topics.
While the system needs improvement – and is not yet at the point where it can debate with a human – the majority of observers evaluated Project Debater's argument transcripts, ranking the AI's performance as decent.
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This is a very significant achievement, given that the technological challenges of mining arguments for such purposes a decade ago were considered impossible, even for state-of-the-art artificial intelligence.
Of course, in recent years we have seen AI surpass human abilities in the gaming world, but argument mining is a more complex endeavor, given the vast amount of information that needs to be analyzed and then connected together.
Information source: sciencealert.com
