2019年12月四级第1套仔细阅读 Passage 1 原文翻译及答案解析

Professor Ashok Goel of Georgia Tech developed an artificially intelligent teaching assistant to help handle the enormous number of student questions in the online class, Knowledge-Based Artificial Intelligence. This online course is a core requirement of Georgia Tech's online Master of Science in Computer Science program Professor Goel already had eight teaching assistants, but that wasn't enough to deal with the overwhelming number of daily questions from students.

佐治亚理工学院的Ashok Goel教授开发了一个人工智能助教，以帮助处理在线课程“基于知识的人工智能”中大量的学生问题。该在线课程是佐治亚理工学院在线计算机科学硕士项目的核心要求。Goel教授已经有八名助教，但仍不足以应对每天学生提出的大量问题。

Many students drop out of online courses because of the lack of teaching support. When students feel isolated or confused and reach out with questions that go unanswered, their motivation to continue begins to fade. Professor Goel decided to do something to remedy this situation and his solution was to create a virtual assistant named Jill Watson, which is based on the IBM Watson platform.

许多学生因缺乏教学支持而退出在线课程。当学生感到孤立或困惑，并提出问题却得不到回答时，他们继续学习的动力开始减弱。Goel教授决定采取措施改善这种情况，他的解决方案是创建一个名为Jill Watson的虚拟助手，该助手基于IBM Watson平台。

Goel and his team developed several versions of Jill Watson before releasing her to the online forums. At first, the virtual assistant wasn't too great. But Goel and his team sourced the online discussion forum to find all 40,000 questions that had ever been asked since the class was launched. Then they began to feed Jill with the questions and answers. After some adjustments, and sufficient time, Jill was able to answer the students' questions correctly 97% of the time. The virtual assistant became so advanced and realistic that the students didn't know she was a computer. The students, who were studying artificial intelligence, were interacting with the virtual assistant and couldn't tell it apart from a real human being. Goel didn't inform them about Jill's true identity until April 26. The students were actually very positive about the experience.

Goel和他的团队在将Jill Watson发布到在线论坛之前，开发了几个版本。起初，虚拟助手表现不佳。但Goel和他的团队从在线讨论论坛中搜集了自课程开设以来提出的所有40,000个问题。然后他们开始用这些问题和答案来训练Jill。经过一些调整和足够的时间后，Jill能够正确回答学生问题的比例达到97%。虚拟助手变得如此先进和逼真，以至于学生们不知道她是计算机。这些学习人工智能的学生与虚拟助手互动，无法区分她和真人。直到4月26日，Goel才告知他们Jill的真实身份。学生们实际上对这次经历非常积极。

The goal of Professor Goel's virtual assistant next year is to take over answering 40% of all the questions posed by students on the online forum. The name Jill Watson will, of course, change to something else next semester. Professor Goel has a much rosier outlook on the future of artificial intelligence than, say, Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates or Steve Wozniak.

明年，Goel教授的虚拟助手的目标是接管回答在线论坛上学生提出的所有问题的40%。当然，Jill Watson这个名字在下学期将会改为其他名字。Goel教授对人工智能未来的展望比例如埃隆·马斯克、斯蒂芬·霍金、比尔·盖茨或史蒂夫·沃兹尼亚克要乐观得多。