Cybernetics

The majority of the Duolingo’s research is published by the Association for Computational Linguistics, in 1962, and which developed out of the field of machine translation (MT) and cybernetics. Contemporary cybernetics began as an interdisciplinary study connecting the fields of control systems, electrical network theory, mechanical engineering, logic modeling, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, anthropology, and psychology in the 1940s, often attributed to the Macy Conferences (Tudico, 2012). The Macy Conferences were a set of meetings of scholars from various disciplines held in New York under the direction of Frank Fremont-Smith at the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation starting in 1941 and ending in 1960. The Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation had close links with the Rockefeller Foundation, which according to Frances Stonor Saunders, author of The Cultural Cold War (1999), served as a front for the CIA. The Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, or Macy Foundation, was founded in 1930 by Kate Macy Ladd (1863–1945), a friend John D. Rockefeller Jr., in honor of her father, Josiah W. Macy Jr. Much of the family firm, known as Josiah Macy and Sons, had been bought by Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Corporation (Tudico, 2012).

The conferences were initiated by Frank Freemont-Smith along with vice-president Lawrence K. Frank, who also worked with the Rockefeller Foundation. among the attendees of the first Macy meeting in 1942 with other scientists such as the anthropologists Gregory Bateson and his wife Margaret Mead, the neurophysiologist Warren McCulloch, the physician and physiologist Arturo Rosenblueth and the psychoanalyst Lawrence Kubie. According to a document from the CIA’s own studies archives, titled The Birth of Central Intelligence, it was Bateson who inspired the founding of the CIA (Darling, 1953). Some of the researchers present at the cybernetics conferences later went on to do extensive government-funded research on the psychological effects of LSD, and its potential as a tool for interrogation and psychological manipulation in such projects as the CIA’s MKULTRA program (Unsworth, 1994).

God and Golem

The founding fathers of cybernetics are two Macy Conference attendees, John Von Neumann, the foremost mathematical consultant to the Manhattan Project, and Norbert Wiener, a child prodigy who was awarded a PhD from Harvard at the age of seventeen. Wiener’s first book was Cybernetics, or Communication and Control in the Animal and the Machine (1948). Wiener tried to tie together different lines of scientific inquiry still novel at the time: digital electronic computing, information theory, early work on neural networks, feedback systems, and work in psychology, psychiatry, decision theory, and the social sciences. The second book was first published in 1950 with the telling title The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society.

In God and Golem, Inc. (1964), Wiener compares the creative power of God with that of man creating machines, and machines ultimately reproducing themselves. Wiener suggests that resistance to these ideas is rooted in the same prejudices that once stigmatized magic, and he drew parallels to the practices of the Black Mass, as well as the Golem of Rabbi Loew and Goethe’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. According to Wiener, “If we adhere to all these taboos, we may acquire a great reputation as conservative and sound thinkers, but we shall contribute very little to the further advance of knowledge. It is the part of the scientist—of the intelligent man of letters and of the honest clergyman as well—to entertain heretical and forbidden opinions experimentally, even if he is finally to reject them” (Wiener, 1964, p. 5). Similarly, von Neumann developed the universal constructor, a self-replicating machine in a cellular automata (CA) environment. The fundamental details of the machine were published in von Neumann’s book Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata, completed in 1966. Von Neumann’s goal was to specify an abstract machine which, when run, would replicate itself.

The “Translation” memorandum

The possibility of using digital computers to translate documents between natural human languages was first mentioned in March 1947 in a letter to Norbert Wiener by Warren Weaver, director of the Natural Sciences Division of the Rockefeller Foundation (Locke & Booth, 1955). In the following two years, Weaver had been encouraged by his colleagues at the Rockefeller Foundation to elaborate on his ideas, which resulted in a memorandum, titled “Translation,” which he wrote in 1949 (Locke & Booth, 1955). The memorandum is said to be perhaps the single most influential publication in the early history of machine translation, and was the direct catalyst for the beginnings of research first in the United States and then eventually throughout the world (Novak, 2012).

Weaver’s memorandum put forward four proposals. The first was that the problem that multiple meanings might be tackled by examining immediate context. The second was inspired by work on an early type of neural networks by core members of the Macy Conferences, Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitt. McCulloch and Pitt wrote a seminal paper entitled A Logical Calculus of Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity (1943). The unit of their model, a simple formalized neuron, is still the standard of reference in the field of neural networks, often called a McCulloch–Pitts neuron. Weaver interpreted their results as meaning that, given a set of premises, any logical conclusion could be deduced automatically by computer. The third proposal was that cryptographic methods were possibly applicable to translation. Finally, the fourth proposal was that there may also be linguistic universals underlying all human languages which could be exploited to ease the challenge of translation.

Georgetown–IBM experiment

Weaver’s memorandum triggered immediate action from the part of other MT specialists. In 1951, Yehoshua Bar-Hillel was appointed as a research assistant in the Research Laboratory for Electronics at MIT. The lab was directed by Jerome B. Wiesner, who had worked briefly after the war at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and who was another participant of the Macy Conferences (Leeds-Hurwitz, 1994). Bar-Hillel’s responsibility was to explore the possibilities for MT implementation and plan further research and to convene the first MT conference. A year later, in 1952, Bar-Hillel organized the first conference devoted to MT at MIT (Hutchins, 1997).

A small-scale system for translating certain Russian sentences into English was presented on January 7, 1954, at demonstration hosted jointly by the Georgetown University and IBM, known as the Georgetown–IBM experiment. Although certain limitations were acknowledged, those attending the conference were sufficiently impressed to offer financial support for MT research (Hutchins, 1997). At the conference, Duncan Harkin from US Department of Defense suggested that his department would finance a new machine translation project (Reynolds, 1954). Jerome Weisner supported the idea and offered finance from the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT (Hutchins, 1997).

Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)

One of the pioneers of MT was the linguist and computer scientist of the RAND Corporation, David Hays, who founded the Association for Computational Linguistics, originally named the Association for Machine Translation and Computational Linguistics (AMTCL). According to the ACL, computational linguistics is “the scientific study of language from a computational perspective. Computational linguists are interested in providing computational models of various kinds of linguistic phenomena” (What is Computational Linguistics? 2005). Hays served as ACL’s second president in 1964. He was the first editor of its journal, Computational Linguistics from 1974 to 1978. He was one of the founders of the International Committee on Computational Linguistics, served as its chairman from 1965 to 1969 and was an honorary member from 1965 to 1995.

References

Bar-Hillel, Y. (1964). Language and Information: Selected Essays on Their Theory and Application. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. pp. 174–179.

Darling, Arthur B. (1953).  The Birth of Central Intelligence. Central Intelligence Agency. Retrieved from https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/kent-csi/vol10no2/html/v10i2a01p_0001.htm

Hutchins, J. (1997). First Steps in Mechanical Translation. Retrieved from https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/First-Steps-in-Mechanical-Translation-Hutchins/2f10e1228ffd2279fbe96923f5cc10ebc3bb632a

Leeds-Hurwitz, W. (1994). Crossing disciplinary boundaries: The Macy Foundation Conferences on Cybernetics as a case study in multidisciplinary communication. Cybernetica: Journal of the International Association for Cybernetics, 3(4), 363-364.

Locke, W.N. & Booth, D.A., eds. (1955). Translation. Machine Translation of Languages. Cambridge: MIT Press. Retrieved from http://www.mt-archive.info/Weaver-1949.pdf

Madsen, M. (2009, December 23). The Limits of Machine Translation. Docs.google.com. Thesis submitted for the degree of Master in Information Technology and Cognition Department of Scandinavian Studies and Linguistics, Faculty of Humanities, University of Copenhagen. Retrieved from https://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B7-4xydn3MXJZjFkZTllZjItN2Q5Ny00YmUxLWEzODItNTYyMjhlNTY5NWIz

Novak, M. (2012, May 30). The Cold War origins of Google Translate. BBC News.

Reynolds, A. Craig (1954). The conference on mechanical translation. Mechanical Translation, 1(3): 47–55.

Tudico, C. (2012). The History of the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation. New York: Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation.

Unsworth, John M. (1994, November). LSD, Mind Control, and the Internet: A Chronology. Handout with Information Theory, Postmodernism, and Mind Control (or, What LSD, Mass Media, and the Internet Have in Common), presented at the 1994 Conference of the Society for Literature and Science, New Orleans.

What is Computational Linguistics? (2005) The Association for Computational Linguistics. February 2005. Retrieved from http://www.aclweb.org/archive/misc/what.html

Wiener, Norbert. God and Golem Inc: A Comment on Certain Points Where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1964).