The quest for the thinking computer
AI Magazine
Lessons from a restricted Turing test
Communications of the ACM
Communications of the ACM
ChatterBots, TinyMuds, and the Turing test: entering the Loebner Prize competition
AAAI '94 Proceedings of the twelfth national conference on Artificial intelligence (vol. 1)
Rat-tale: sociology's contribution to understanding human and machine cognition
Expertise in context
ELIZA—a computer program for the study of natural language communication between man and machine
Communications of the ACM
Communications of the ACM
The Status and Future of the Turing Test
Minds and Machines
The interrogator as critic: The turing test and the evaluation of generative music systems
Computer Music Journal
Some cognitive aspects of a turing test for children
Proceedings of the 2005 joint Chinese-German conference on Cognitive systems
Hi-index | 0.00 |
This paper argues that the Turing test is based on a fixed and de-contextualized view of communicative competence. According to this view, a machine that passes the test will be able to communicate effectively in a variety of other situations. But the de-contextualized view ignores the relationship between language and social context, or, to put it another way, the extent to which speakers respond dynamically to variations in discourse function, formality level, social distance/solidarity among participants, and participants' relative degrees of power and status (Holmes, 1992). In the case of the Loebner Contest, a present day version of the Turing test, the social context of interaction can be interpreted in conflicting ways. For example, Loebner discourse is defined 1) as a friendly, casual conversation between two strangers of equal power, and 2) as a one-way transaction in which judges control the conversational floor in an attempt to expose contestants that are not human. This conflict in discourse function is irrelevant so long as the goal of the contest is to ensure that only thinking, human entities pass the test. But if the function of Loebner discourse is to encourage the production of software that can pass for human on the level of conversational ability, then the contest designers need to resolve this ambiguity in discourse function, and thus also come to terms with the kind of competence they are trying to measure.