Project Debater is an IBM artificial intelligence project, designed to participate in a full live debate with expert human debaters. It follows on from the Watson project which played Jeopardy! == Development == Project Debater was developed at IBM's lab in Haifa, Israel. The project was proposed by Noam Slonim in 2011 as the IBM Research next Grand Challenge, following Deep Blue and the victory of Watson in Jeopardy! It was exposed for the first time in a closed media event at June 18, 2018, in San Francisco, under the leadership of Ranit Aharonov and Slonim, both from the IBM Research lab in Haifa, Israel. The AI technology debated two human debaters, Noa Ovadia, who was the 2016 Israeli debate champion and Dan Zafrir. The two debated on the topics "We should subsidize space exploration" and "Should we increase the use of telemedicine." A demonstration of Project Debater also aired on the Discovery Channel in June 2018 debating the question of whether sports gambling should be legalized. == Live Debate == On February 11, 2019, Project Debater was revealed to the world in a live debate in San Francisco. Nonpartisan media group Intelligence Squared U.S. Debates hosted the debate which was moderated by journalist John Donvan. The debate took place between Project Debater and Harish Natarajan, who holds the world record in number of debate competition victories. The motion was “We should subsidize preschools.” == That's Debatable Television Show == Project Debater was featured in a television series called “That’s Debatable” presented by Intelligence Squared U.S. Debates and Bloomberg Media. For each episode of “That’s Debatable,” Project Debater provided insight into three distinct debate topics on the redistribution of wealth, modern monetary theory, and a US-China space race. More than 5,000 arguments were submitted online from around the world across the three topics, which were then analyzed and distilled into key points that were highlighted on the television show and discussed by human debaters. == Artificial Intelligence Capabilities == To develop Project Debater, the IBM Research team had to endow the system with the following AI capabilities: Data-driven speech writing and delivery: Project Debater is the first demonstration of a computer that can digest massive corpora, and given a short description of a controversial topic, write a well-structured speech, and deliver it with clarity and purpose, while even incorporating humor where appropriate. Listening comprehension: the ability to identify the key concepts and claims hidden within long continuous spoken language. Four minutes of persuasive speech: the guarantee of producing four minutes of persuasive speech. Modeling human dilemmas: modeling the world of human controversy and dilemmas in a unique knowledge representation, enabling the system to suggest principled arguments as needed. An article on the project was published in Nature in March 2021.
Connection string
In computing, a connection string is a string that specifies information about a data source and the means of connecting to it. It is passed in code to an underlying driver or provider in order to initiate the connection. Whilst commonly used for a database connection, the data source could also be a spreadsheet or text file. The connection string may include attributes such as the name of the driver, server and database, as well as security information such as user name and password. == Examples == This example shows a PostgreSQL connection string for connecting to wikipedia.com with SSL and a connection timeout of 180 seconds: DRIVER={PostgreSQL Unicode};SERVER=www.wikipedia.com;SSL=true;SSLMode=require;DATABASE=wiki;UID=wikiuser;Connect Timeout=180;PWD=ashiknoor Users of Oracle databases can specify connection strings: on the command line (as in: sqlplus scott/tiger@connection_string ) via environment variables ($TWO_TASK in Unix-like environments; %TWO_TASK% in Microsoft Windows environments) in local configuration files (such as the default $ORACLE_HOME/network/admin.tnsnames.ora) in LDAP-capable directory services
METAL MT
A machine translation system developed at the University of Texas and at Siemens which ran on Lisp Machines. == Background == Originally titled the Linguistics Research System (LRS), it was later renamed METAL (Mechanical Translation and Analysis of Languages). It started life as a German-English system funded by the USAF. == 1980 == A copy of the Weidner Multi-Lingual Word Processing software was requested by the German Government for the Siemens Corporation of Germany in September 1980 and was nicknamed the Siemens-Weidner Engine (originally English-German). This revolutionary multilingual word processing engine became foundational in the development of the Metal MT project, according to John White of the Siemens Corporation. After the Metal MT, development Rights to the Siemens-Weidner Engine were sold to a Belgium company, Lernout & Hauspie. The Siemens copy of the Weidner Multilingual Word Processing software has since been acquired through the purchase of assets of Lernout & Hauspie by Bowne Global Solutions, Inc., which was later acquired by Lionbridge Technologies, Inc. and is demonstrated in their itranslator software.
IBM alignment models
The IBM alignment models are a sequence of increasingly complex models used in statistical machine translation to train a translation model and an alignment model, starting with lexical translation probabilities and moving to reordering and word duplication. They underpinned the majority of statistical machine translation systems for almost twenty years starting in the early 1990s, until neural machine translation began to dominate. These models offer principled probabilistic formulation and (mostly) tractable inference. The IBM alignment models were published in parts in 1988 and 1990, and the entire series is published in 1993. Every author of the 1993 paper subsequently went to the hedge fund Renaissance Technologies. The original work on statistical machine translation at IBM proposed five models, and a model 6 was proposed later. The sequence of the six models can be summarized as: Model 1: lexical translation Model 2: additional absolute alignment model Model 3: extra fertility model Model 4: added relative alignment model Model 5: fixed deficiency problem. Model 6: Model 4 combined with a HMM alignment model in a log linear way == Mathematical setup == The IBM alignment models translation as a conditional probability model. For each source-language ("foreign") sentence f {\displaystyle f} , we generate both a target-language ("English") sentence e {\displaystyle e} and an alignment a {\displaystyle a} . The problem then is to find a good statistical model for p ( e , a | f ) {\displaystyle p(e,a|f)} , the probability that we would generate English language sentence e {\displaystyle e} and an alignment a {\displaystyle a} given a foreign sentence f {\displaystyle f} . The meaning of an alignment grows increasingly complicated as the model version number grew. See Model 1 for the most simple and understandable version. == Model 1 == === Word alignment === Given any foreign-English sentence pair ( e , f ) {\displaystyle (e,f)} , an alignment for the sentence pair is a function of type { 1 , . , . . . , l e } → { 0 , 1 , . , . . . , l f } {\displaystyle \{1,.,...,l_{e}\}\to \{0,1,.,...,l_{f}\}} . That is, we assume that the English word at location i {\displaystyle i} is "explained" by the foreign word at location a ( i ) {\displaystyle a(i)} . For example, consider the following pair of sentences It will surely rain tomorrow -- 明日 は きっと 雨 だWe can align some English words to corresponding Japanese words, but not everyone:it -> ? will -> ? surely -> きっと rain -> 雨 tomorrow -> 明日This in general happens due to the different grammar and conventions of speech in different languages. English sentences require a subject, and when there is no subject available, it uses a dummy pronoun it. Japanese verbs do not have different forms for future and present tense, and the future tense is implied by the noun 明日 (tomorrow). Conversely, the topic-marker は and the grammar word だ (roughly "to be") do not correspond to any word in the English sentence. So, we can write the alignment as 1-> 0; 2 -> 0; 3 -> 3; 4 -> 4; 5 -> 1where 0 means that there is no corresponding alignment. Thus, we see that the alignment function is in general a function of type { 1 , . , . . . , l e } → { 0 , 1 , . , . . . , l f } {\displaystyle \{1,.,...,l_{e}\}\to \{0,1,.,...,l_{f}\}} . Future models will allow one English world to be aligned with multiple foreign words. === Statistical model === Given the above definition of alignment, we can define the statistical model used by Model 1: Start with a "dictionary". Its entries are of form t ( e i | f j ) {\displaystyle t(e_{i}|f_{j})} , which can be interpreted as saying "the foreign word f j {\displaystyle f_{j}} is translated to the English word e i {\displaystyle e_{i}} with probability t ( e i | f j ) {\displaystyle t(e_{i}|f_{j})} ". After being given a foreign sentence f {\displaystyle f} with length l f {\displaystyle l_{f}} , we first generate an English sentence length l e {\displaystyle l_{e}} uniformly in a range U n i f o r m [ 1 , 2 , . . . , N ] {\displaystyle Uniform[1,2,...,N]} . In particular, it does not depend on f {\displaystyle f} or l f {\displaystyle l_{f}} . Then, we generate an alignment uniformly in the set of all possible alignment functions { 1 , . , . . . , l e } → { 0 , 1 , . , . . . , l f } {\displaystyle \{1,.,...,l_{e}\}\to \{0,1,.,...,l_{f}\}} . Finally, for each English word e 1 , e 2 , . . . e l e {\displaystyle e_{1},e_{2},...e_{l_{e}}} , generate each one independently of every other English word. For the word e i {\displaystyle e_{i}} , generate it according to t ( e i | f a ( i ) ) {\displaystyle t(e_{i}|f_{a(i)})} . Together, we have the probability p ( e , a | f ) = 1 / N ( 1 + l f ) l e ∏ i = 1 l e t ( e i | f a ( i ) ) {\displaystyle p(e,a|f)={\frac {1/N}{(1+l_{f})^{l_{e}}}}\prod _{i=1}^{l_{e}}t(e_{i}|f_{a(i)})} IBM Model 1 uses very simplistic assumptions on the statistical model, in order to allow the following algorithm to have closed-form solution. === Learning from a corpus === If a dictionary is not provided at the start, but we have a corpus of English-foreign language pairs { ( e ( k ) , f ( k ) ) } k {\displaystyle \{(e^{(k)},f^{(k)})\}_{k}} (without alignment information), then the model can be cast into the following form: fixed parameters: the foreign sentences { f ( k ) } k {\displaystyle \{f^{(k)}\}_{k}} . learnable parameters: the entries of the dictionary t ( e i | f j ) {\displaystyle t(e_{i}|f_{j})} . observable variables: the English sentences { e ( k ) } k {\displaystyle \{e^{(k)}\}_{k}} . latent variables: the alignments { a ( k ) } k {\displaystyle \{a^{(k)}\}_{k}} In this form, this is exactly the kind of problem solved by expectation–maximization algorithm. Due to the simplistic assumptions, the algorithm has a closed-form, efficiently computable solution, which is the solution to the following equations: { max t ′ ∑ k ∑ i ∑ a ( k ) t ( a ( k ) | e ( k ) , f ( k ) ) ln t ( e i ( k ) | f a ( k ) ( i ) ( k ) ) ∑ x t ′ ( e x | f y ) = 1 ∀ y {\displaystyle {\begin{cases}\max _{t'}\sum _{k}\sum _{i}\sum _{a^{(k)}}t(a^{(k)}|e^{(k)},f^{(k)})\ln t(e_{i}^{(k)}|f_{a^{(k)}(i)}^{(k)})\\\sum _{x}t'(e_{x}|f_{y})=1\quad \forall y\end{cases}}} This can be solved by Lagrangian multipliers, then simplified. For a detailed derivation of the algorithm, see chapter 4 and. In short, the EM algorithm goes as follows:INPUT. a corpus of English-foreign sentence pairs { ( e ( k ) , f ( k ) ) } k {\displaystyle \{(e^{(k)},f^{(k)})\}_{k}} INITIALIZE. matrix of translations probabilities t ( e x | f y ) {\displaystyle t(e_{x}|f_{y})} .This could either be uniform or random. It is only required that every entry is positive, and for each y {\displaystyle y} , the probability sums to one: ∑ x t ( e x | f y ) = 1 {\displaystyle \sum _{x}t(e_{x}|f_{y})=1} . LOOP. until t ( e x | f y ) {\displaystyle t(e_{x}|f_{y})} converges: t ( e x | f y ) ← t ( e x | f y ) λ y ∑ k , i , j δ ( e x , e i ( k ) ) δ ( f y , f j ( k ) ) ∑ j ′ t ( e i ( k ) | f j ′ ( k ) ) {\displaystyle t(e_{x}|f_{y})\leftarrow {\frac {t(e_{x}|f_{y})}{\lambda _{y}}}\sum _{k,i,j}{\frac {\delta (e_{x},e_{i}^{(k)})\delta (f_{y},f_{j}^{(k)})}{\sum _{j'}t(e_{i}^{(k)}|f_{j'}^{(k)})}}} where each λ y {\displaystyle \lambda _{y}} is a normalization constant that makes sure each ∑ x t ( e x | f y ) = 1 {\displaystyle \sum _{x}t(e_{x}|f_{y})=1} .RETURN. t ( e x | f y ) {\displaystyle t(e_{x}|f_{y})} .In the above formula, δ {\displaystyle \delta } is the Dirac delta function -- it equals 1 if the two entries are equal, and 0 otherwise. The index notation is as follows: k {\displaystyle k} ranges over English-foreign sentence pairs in corpus; i {\displaystyle i} ranges over words in English sentences; j {\displaystyle j} ranges over words in foreign language sentences; x {\displaystyle x} ranges over the entire vocabulary of English words in the corpus; y {\displaystyle y} ranges over the entire vocabulary of foreign words in the corpus. === Limitations === There are several limitations to the IBM model 1. No fluency: Given any sentence pair ( e , f ) {\displaystyle (e,f)} , any permutation of the English sentence is equally likely: p ( e | f ) = p ( e ′ | f ) {\displaystyle p(e|f)=p(e'|f)} for any permutation of the English sentence e {\displaystyle e} into e ′ {\displaystyle e'} . No length preference: The probability of each length of translation is equal: ∑ e has length l p ( e | f ) = 1 N {\displaystyle \sum _{e{\text{ has length }}l}p(e|f)={\frac {1}{N}}} for any l ∈ { 1 , 2 , . . . , N } {\displaystyle l\in \{1,2,...,N\}} . Does not explicitly model fertility: some foreign words tend to produce a fixed number of English words. For example, for German-to-English translation, ja is usually omitted, and zum is usually translated to one of to the, for the, to a, for a. == Model 2 == Model 2 allows alignment to be conditional on sentence lengths. That is, we have a probability distribution p a ( j | i , l e , l f ) {\displaystyle
RE/flex
RE/flex (or RE-flex) is a computer program that generates lexical analyzers also known as "scanners" or "lexers". Lexical analysis is the process of converting an input character stream into a sequence of tokens, a task known as lexical tokenization. == Overview == Most notable lexer generators used in practice, including Flex, Ragel, and RE/flex are based on deterministic finite automata (DFA) for efficient pattern matching, despite the theoretical possibility of an exponential increase in DFA size. In practice, lexer specifications typically use deterministic regular expressions, which makes substantial DFA blowup uncommon. RE/flex translates a POSIX-compliant lexer specification directly into a DFA using standard construction techniques described in the compiler literature, extending the techniques to handle lazy matching and indentation detection applicable to specific programming language tokenization tasks. Like Flex, RE/flex generates efficient DFA-based scanners, but it shares no code with Flex and is implemented as a complete rewrite in C++. In addition to its native DFA-based engine, RE/flex can also be combined with external regular expression libraries that are not DFA-based, such as the C++ standard library regex engine, PCRE, and boost.regex. This is achieved by systematically rewriting the set of lexer patterns into a form suitable for tokenization with the selected external library. RE/flex performs this rewriting automatically using translation rules that are specific to each supported regular expression library. A lexer specification defines a set of regular expression patterns { p i : i = 1 , … , n } {\displaystyle \{p_{i}:i=1,\ldots ,n\}} corresponding to different token classes, such as identifiers, keywords, literals, and operators. These patterns can be combined into a single regular expression R = ( p 1 ) ∣ ( p 2 ) ∣ … ∣ ( p n ) {\displaystyle R=(p_{1})\mid (p_{2})\mid \ldots \mid (p_{n})} . When applied to an input string, a regular expression engine repeatedly matches R {\displaystyle R} , returning the index i of the matched subpattern ( p i ) {\displaystyle (p_{i})} , thereby decomposing the input into a sequence of tokens. Example use cases include: Compiler construction, such as the use of RE/flex in the Tiger Compiler project within the EPITA compiler construction curriculum Compiler-compiler systems, including its use in Ox, an attribute-grammar–based compiling system Pattern matching and search tools, such as grep-like utilities, including the use of RE/flex in ugrep
Adobe Encore
Adobe Encore (previously Adobe Encore DVD) was a DVD authoring software tool produced by Adobe Systems and targeted at professional video producers. Video and audio resources could be used in their current format for development, allowing the user to transcode them to MPEG-2 video and Dolby Digital audio upon project completion. DVD menus could be created and edited in Adobe Photoshop using special layering techniques. Adobe Encore did not support writing to a Blu-ray Disc using AVCHD 2.0. Encore is bundled with Adobe Premiere Pro CS6. Adobe Encore CS6 was the last release. While Premiere Pro CC has moved to the Creative Cloud, Encore has now been discontinued. == Licensing == All forms of Adobe Encore used a proprietary licensing system from its developer, Adobe Systems. Versions 1.0 and 1.5 required a separate license fee (rather than making 1.5 available as a free update). Version 3, also known as CS3, was sold only in bundle with Premiere CS3. Encore CS4, CS5, CS5.5 and CS6 were only sold in the Premiere Pro CS4, CS5, CS5.5 and CS6 bundles, respectively. Adobe CC subscribers no longer have access to Adobe Encore CS6. Adobe Encore is not included with Premiere Pro CC. == Functionality == Adobe Encore allowed for creating interactive DVD menus from Photoshop documents, which could be tweaked from within Encore. Video and audio streams could be embedded in the DVD and be made to play when certain elements of the menu are interacted with. It had similar functionality to Adobe Flash and Premiere Pro, due to its ability to both edit video on a timeline and embed interactive content.
Is an Conversational AI Platform Worth It in 2026?
Looking for the best conversational AI platform? An conversational AI platform is software that uses machine learning to help you get more done — it can save you hours every week by automating repetitive work. Most options offer a generous free tier, with paid plans unlocking higher limits, faster processing, and team features. Whether you are a beginner or a pro, the right conversational AI platform slots into your workflow and pays for itself fast. This guide breaks down the top picks, their pros and cons, and who each one is best for.