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Using romance novels to teach conversational skills

Using romance novels to teach conversational skills

Using romance novels to teach conversational skills

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‘Learning language from the language of love’: That was the headline that caught my eye in the news recently.

Have you heard about Google’s artificial intelligence (AI) engine, and its new reading material?

Some time ago, Google realised that the conversational skills used in its many products were somewhat lacking: the language was stilted and dull. So the research team decided to feed text into the AI engine in an attempt to teach it to ‘be more conversational, or have a more varied tone, or style, or register’ (source: BuzzFeed).

The Google team decided on a particular type of writing to ‘feed’ the machine: romance novels, some 2,865of them in total. Because romance is based on core stories, the AI can find common ground between the books and match up which sentences have the same essential meaning, thereby learning how to say the same thing in different ways based on the many linguistic examples. The result is a more nuanced comprehension, and the developers say that in testing the AI is now writing better sentences for itself, with more personality.

Setting aside the obvious discussion on AI and whether this engine could now theoretically write its own romance novel, what fascinates me about this story is that the romance genre was selected from all other book genres as the one to educate the AI. What does this say about romance novels?

Of course the core plots come into play, but this is an exercise in teaching the AI to ‘speak’ in a more natural, friendly, lively way; to ‘writer better’. Ergo: romance novels are well-written.

The romance genre is the best-selling one worldwide, and yet it has long suffered from disrespect and even derision from a small group of literary elitists. A news story like this is like a shiny gold trophy for all romance authors and all romance readers. If the language of love is good enough for a futuristic, intelligent, cutting-edge AI, it’s absolutely good enough for we humans!

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