Harish Natarajan
This is a collection of articles archived for the excellence of their content. |
2019: beats IBM’s Miss Debater
From: Olivia Carville & Jeremy Kahn, A human just triumphed over IBM’s AI debating machine, February 13, 2019: The Times of India
IBM fell short in its latest attempt to prove machines can triumph over man. But it came close.
The tech giant’s six-yearold artificial intelligence debating system, dubbed “Miss Debater,” went head-to-head with one of the world’s most decorated practitioners on Monday. After a 25-minute rapid-fire exchange about preschool subsidies, the audience handed the victory to 31-yearold Harish Natarajan.
The unorthodox contest marked the latest highly marketed man-versus-machine challenge, including a chess match against a grandmaster in which machine emerged victorious in 1996. But debating — which requires creativity and emotive elocution — has proven more elusive.
IBM’s machine — known formally as Project Debater — kicked off Monday’s matchup with a cheeky greeting. “I have heard you hold the world record in debate competition wins against humans, but I suspect you have never debated a machine. Welcome to the future.”
The event unfolded in front of hundreds of journalists, tech industry insiders and software engineers at IBM’s Think conference in San Francisco. The topic: We should subsidise preschools. CEO Ginni Rometty was among the spectators, who voted Natarajan the victor but also said the AI better enriched their knowledge.
Both contestants were given the topic at the same time and had 15 minutes to pare down arguments into a fourminute speech, four-minute rebuttal and two-minute summary. Standing at human height, Project Debater’s ominous black box remained silent except for three rotating blue circles as it mulled over 10 billion sentences from news articles and scientific journals. Facing her onstage, Natarajan scrawled notes on scrap paper.
While the AI lost, the event was a culmination of sorts for the project’s progenitor Noam Slonim. Sitting in the front row on Monday, the researcher could be seen laughing and cringing during the debate. He knew they were the underdogs: Natarajan holds the record for most debate competition wins and was a grand finalist in 2016’s World Debating Championships.
“It’s like you’re sitting there in the audience with your kid on stage competing against a world-class pianist and everybody is watching,” he said. Unlike chess or Jeopardy, debating requires connecting with people and convincing them of a viewpoint. The biggest advantage any human holds over Project Debater is the ability to deliver speech with emotion, wielding tone, inflection, pitch and pauses to sway an audience.
Slonim hatched the idea of Project Debater in 2011 while Watson’s victory in Jeopardy still resonated. The following year, he led a research team in Israel that began studying the way humans learn the art of debate, and built a system to mirror that process. Their machine scans more than 300 million newspaper articles and scientific journals to identify relevant arguments on any given topic. It then has to determine which facts and opinions are for or against, build a speech and deliver it clearly and cohesively. What’s more, the AI then has to comprehend the opponent’s argument and craft a rebuttal.
Miss Debater still needs some work. Longer-term, Slonim and his fellow researchers, Ranit Aharonov and Talia Gershon, are exploring whether AI can help expand the human mind. For instance, Project Debater may one day help lawyers pore through thousands of court cases to form arguments.
“Think about it. We don’t often see a machine having an intelligent discussion with a human for 25 minutes,” Slonim said.
