Reading this article gave me the inspiration to write this blog. It talks about the research done to analyze how to best talk and deal with customers if you were working for a business. Important research, I might add, given that nobody wants to lose customers.
What really caught my interest, however, was that the article cited a combination of “natural language processing, computational linguistics, and psychology experiments” to analyze the best words and phrases to get a customer to return, or to apologize for an error. This research shows the interrelatedness of computational linguistics and computing as a whole to other fields, especially those related to communication.
Computational linguistics is related to psychology, for example, because in order to study how a person might react to a given phrasing or wording, one must understand the psychology and behaviors of that person, what would sound pleasing and displeasing, and how a person might react. And, if the goal is to find the best phrases or wordings, we use computational linguistics to generate these phrases and wordings. With an understanding of psychology, we can predict which words will have a positive effect and which words will have a negative effect, and with an understanding of computational linguistics it is possible to feed this information to a computer and have it spit out the best possible phrases. In order to get an understanding of human psychology in these cases, then, it is important that we have a good understanding in cognitive neuroscience: how our brains are wired and programmed (kind of like a computer!) to respond to input. If we knew how our brains were wired, then we could model them with computers and enter the next level of artificial intelligence. I’m deviating now, but the point is all of these fields are related.
Underlying all of these fields is one deceivingly simple human function: communication. More and more research is becoming revolved around communication. Questions like how machines like Alexa, Siri, or even your TV can understand you or how unconscious bias affects societies are becoming popular, and they are being solved with computers. Communication is also in the form of education, another field I’m interested in researching. Again, education research into the best methods of teaching would benefit from an understanding in psychology and computational linguistics, which would reveal the best ways to present information so that they are best absorbed and retained. Perhaps the founders of the computers wouldn’t have expected computers, machines intended to compute mathematics, to solve today’s communication issues.
Michael Chen 