Unlike most humans, AI chatbots struggle to respond appropriately in text-based conversations when faced with idioms, metaphors, rhetorical questions, and sarcasm.
Small talk can be difficult for machines. Although language models can write sentences that are grammatically correct, they aren’t very good at coping with subtle nuances in communication. Humans have much more experience in social interactions, and use all sorts of cues from facial expressions and vocal tones to body language to understand intent. Chatbots, however, have limited contextual knowledge and relationships between words are reduced to numbers and mathematical operations.
Not only is figurative speech challenging for algorithms to parse, things like idioms and similes aren’t used often in speech. They don’t appear in training datasets as much, meaning chatbots are less likely to learn common expressions, Harsh Jhamtani, a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon and first author of a research paper being presented at the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing this week, explained to The Register.
Source: https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/20/china_vpn_foreign_investment/
