To build a smarter chatbot, first teach it a second language

From Alexa and Siri to countless chatbots and automated customer support lines, computers are gradually learning to talk. The only trouble is they are still very easily confused. A research team at Salesforce has come up with a clever way to improve the performance of many modern language programs--teaching an algorithm to speak another language before training it to do other tasks. Teaching machines to hold a coherent conversation remains one of the big outstanding challenges in AI because untangling the meaning of spoken or written text so often relies on a broader understanding of the world, or commonsense knowledge (see "AI's Language Problem"). It turns out that training a machine-learning system to translate between two languages automatically teaches it useful things about the relationship and appropriate context of words.