Cognitive Systems: Toward Human-Level Functionality

in, when we choose an approach to solving a problem we face, we willy-nilly make a few high-level methodological choices. One such choice is between developing systems that aim to supplant humans — cognitive prostheses — and systems that aim to enhance human performance — cognitive orthotics. The distinction between the two is clear on the example of machine translation (MT). Although prosthetic systems aim to supplant humans by independently matching human performance on a task, most prosthetic systems still have to rely on people to yield a high-quality final result. Thus, results of Google Translate must be edited by a person to yield a high-quality translation. The practice of postediting the results of machine translation has been employed for over half a century. It is clear that today’s fully automatic MT systems yield much better raw translations than systems of yore, thus making the job of a Articles