By SIMON COLLINS science reporter
Scientists are developing a bilingual computer that will be able to understand and speak English and Maori.
The researchers, at Auckland University of Technology and Otago University's Knowledge Engineering Laboratory, have already developed a Maori-English translation service that is available free on the internet at http:/kel.otago.ac.nz/translator.
They
are now developing software that will allow a computer to learn spoken words in both English and Maori and talk back to people in either tongue.
Mark Laws, a post-doctoral research fellow working on the project, plans to extend the system within three years to Rarotongan, Tahitian, Hawaiian and the language of Rapanui (Easter Island).
Ultimately, he and the AUT team want to create a computer system that will be able to understand all forms of human communication, including body language.
"My goal is that one day we can throw away our keyboard and mouse, and interact via speech, hand signs, facial movements and eye tracking," Dr Laws said.
"The computer will be able to identify the speaker based on facial recognition, or it could have a touch tablet for fingerprinting, or voice control, and then it will automatically customise itself to that person and welcome them."
Dr Laws is part of a 15-person team at the AUT Technology Park in Penrose who launched a new research centre this week, the Knowledge Engineering and Discovery Research Institute.
The institute, headed by Bulgarian-born Professor Nic Kasabov, has won grants of $400,000 a year for the next three years from the Foundation for Research, Science and Technology to develop "intelligent information systems".
Unlike traditional computers, which just follow pre-recorded instructions, an "intelligent" computer will be able to learn and think like humans.
"It will be able to take new data, new speakers, new languages, new signs, new images, and have the ability to remember them and to generalise," Dr Laws said.
"Most systems, when you ask for the distance from point A to point B, will give you an accurate measurement such as '5.236m'.
"When a system has been generalised, it would say the distance is 'about 5m'.
"Humans generalise all the time ... So we are developing software based on the ability to classify and remember in a broad, fuzzy process which we always do - to make it look like the human brain."
Dr Laws, who moved to AUT from Otago two months ago, is president of the National Association of Maori Mathematicians, Scientists and Technologists.
He plans to divide his time in the next three years between AUT and the University of Hawaii, and will then become the founding head of a planned computer science department at the Maori university in Whakatane, Te Whare Wananga O Awanuiarangi.
