![\"AI](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/1757741587_519_532df5144941f2605a79e5e3c500321bb1ddca6a.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n\u201cHot enough for you?\u201d Probably not, given the season. Or maybe the mercury has climbed since I wrote this column. Who\u2019s to say? Certainly not Google Overview or any other AI tool doing its robotic best to grasp our inner temperature, sifting what humans mean behind the words we say.<\/p>\n
English is never easy. Ask Felipe, my Chilean barista, who fills the caf\u00e9 with his bossa nova covers before his boss arrives. One day, an Ipanema travesty of Radiohead\u2019s Creep mugging my senses, Felipe asked, \u201cYou like this song?\u201d I gave a brave smile: \u201cYeah right\u201d. Meaning no, though all Felipe heard was a double positive, so he turned it up.<\/p>\n
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AI struggles to fully grasp our inner temperature.Credit: Getty<\/p>\n
With that mix-up in mind, imagine a chatbot\u2019s chances of grappling with idiom, puns, nuance, vernacular. Words on the surface will often disguise their meaning beneath. If a robot heard about a pop-up taco truck charging like a wounded bull, it would likely run for cover. Even Aditya Joshi, when first arriving in Australia from India, was thrown by our way of saying things. In 2018, say, a colleague at the University of NSW asked \u201cHow are you going?\u201d Joshi did his best to answer: \u201cI\u2019m taking the bus.\u201d<\/p>\n
Since then, doing a doctorate in natural language processing, Joshi has been helping AI tools communicate more reliably with non-American versions of English. Sentiment and sarcasm are the major hurdles, the algorithm struggling to isolate a speaker\u2019s vibe imbued in the local dialects of here, India and England. His research bestie is BESSTIE, the Benchmark for Sentiment and Sarcasm for Varieties of English, a system fed with Reddit posts and Google reviews (drawn from each target language) to help the software decipher a comment\u2019s drift.<\/p>\n
\u201cGood chat\u201d can mean just that, or often its opposite. \u201cNot bad\u201d is another weasel to wrangle.<\/p>\n
\u201cI love being ignored,\u201d say, can mean the speaker loves to be overlooked, or doesn\u2019t. Humans depend on context and tone \u2013 often emoji in written form\u2013 to determine which, plus the bias of the expression\u2019s cultural history. \u201cDon\u2019t you just love\u2026\u201d – as a construction in Australian English \u2013 will often precede an object the speaker does not love, like bossa nova covers.<\/p>\n
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