A computer system developed by Associate Professor Regina Barzilay, her graduate student S.R.K Branavan and David Silver of University College London has demonstrated the ability to learn language through playing a complex computer game. The system, which had no prior knowledge of how to play “Civilization” or the language in which the game’s instructions were written, was able to infer the meaning of words without human assistance as the game progressed.
Barzilay and her students hope to apply their findings to robotic systems.
For more on Barzilay’s work, visit http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/language-from-games-0712.html.