Natural Language Processing in the Movies

In Volume 13 Issue 390 of the Linguist List (Tuesday 12th February 2002), I posted a query asking for pointers to portrayals of natural language processing in movies, to which I received 13 responses. Posting a summary of those replies to the list provoked yet more responses. A complete list of people's suggestions and comments is below, listed alphabetically by movie title. There's also a page of related links to stuff like information on AI in the movies.

If you have additional suggestions I'd be very pleased to receive them: just send an email to Robert.Dale@mq.edu.au, and I'll incorporate your suggestion into this list. If you'd prefer to remain anonymous, just let me know. A great big thanks to everyone who has contributed so far.

• Bladerunner: 'In another "classic" science fi movie "Bladerunner", I remember a great scene near the beginning where the main character is speaking to some video processor that zooms and pans etc according to his voice commands. I recall that as being very cool, and would likely satisfy your requirements. It's one-way natural language communication. The computer doesn't talk back, and it's purely a command-language understanding system serving as a front-end to this video processor.' [Kurt Godden]

• Clear and Present Danger: '... in which a computer system makes a voice-match between a recording of a phone call and a recording held on file, all within about five seconds. The speech analyst then goes on to announce that the suspect in question is 'Hmm, Colombian, but educated in the United States. East coast, that is,' before Harrison Ford rushes off to nail the felon in question and some other baddies while he's about it.' [Dom Watt]

• Contact: 'Does 'Contact' dabble with NLP at all? It's a while since I've seen it, but maybe it was all done in binary, I don't know. [Dom Watt]

• Demolition Man: 'Some guy in a sci-fi police department is a call center agent. He picks up the phone and says something like: "Hi, this is XYZ speaking, police department ZYX. If you want to speek to a computer, please press 1 ..."' [Damir Cavar]

• Earth vs. the Flying Saucers: 'The 50's science fi movie 'Earth vs. the Flying Saucers' has machine translation of the alien language -- with a row of pens on a mechanical arm that writes out the translation in script. This is just a piece of the film -- which is not the best of its class, though quite amusing -- but is more CL than AI.' [Brian Roark]

• Face Off: 'Extremes of speech technology-related silliness can be found in 'Face Off', in which a chip is implanted in John Travolta's/Nicholas Cage's neck so as to make him sound exactly like his arch-enemy Nicholas Cage/John Travolta. How this might work is anybody's guess. I was going to say 'but never mind - hey, it's a great movie', but since 'Face Off' is unadulterated tripe from start to finish, I won't.' [Dom Watt]

• Firefly: One of the special features on the DVD release of the TV series "Firefly" features a handheld encyclopedia device that provides information in spoken form. The intonation suggests that both that it's text to speech and that the state of the art hasn't progressed much in the 500-1000 years that's meant to have passed between now and the time of "Firefly". In contrast, their search technology is quite good: the system correctly chooses "The Battle of Serenity Valley" from the input search term "serenity". [Mary Gardiner]

• Forbidden Planet '... (playfully based on "The Tempest") in which Robbie the Robot can understand English and follow commands; at least as interesting as Robbie's magical behavior (turn garbage into jewels, etc.) is the leftover technology of the original population of the isolated planet.' [Nancy Frishberg]

• Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: '... has the Babel fish, but they don't exactly explain how it works, do they? It does have the wonderful race that was so smart that they were punished by the "gift" of telepathy. They got so sick of people being able to read their thoughts that they invented spoken language to mask was they were really thinking. Still, it's not computational.' [Doug Whalen, John Dunnion]

• In The Code Conspiracy: '... all hell breaks loose, when a couple of friends that own a software development company accidentally stumble upon the key to breaking the "Torah Codes" in the Dead Sea Scrolls, which enables them to know everyone's future as well as scientifically proving the existence of God. Now, everyone wants the information, and they'll kill who ever they have to to get it.' [Plot summary from the Internet Movie Database; discovered by Peter Turney, who also suggested this as a good place to search for other possibilities.]

• Mars Attack: '... where a whole bunch of flying saucers from Mars surround earth and no one knows what their intentions are. So the U.S. government brings in a professor who's been working on a translation machine for years. The machine translates voice into voice, with intonation and emotion. But apparently it is not very accurate and almost costs the annihilation of earth.' [Mohammad Haji-Abdolhosseini]

  '... you might want to look at the translation machine in "Mars attacks!", a really silly but very amusing spoof on B-grade sci-fi movies. It was made in 1996, directed by Tim Burton and stars Jack Nicholson as president of the US, Glenn Close as his wife, Sara Jessica Parker and a number of other unlikely stars. The machine is trotted out to the desert by a white lab-coat mad scientist, to translate what the invading Martians will say. It was trained on incoming transmissions captured before they arrive, and does translate from Martian to English and English to Martian. The machine itself is a 50's style square box with dials and knobs and a smallish round green display screen. But I thought the training part was very much a 90's idea, and they even talk about much data they need to get good results.' [Dominique Estival]

• Primary Colors: 'There's a preposterous scene in 'Primary Colors', but I forget the exact details now: something about the John Travolta/Bill Clinton character being smeared by the press for apparently saying something he didn't (the tape, it turns out, was spliced together from bits of recordings of things he did say). I seem to remember there's some kind of jiggery-pokery with a sound spectrograph or waveform analyser just to lend things a bit of scientific credibility.' [Dom Watt]

• Red Dwarf [a TV series]: 'The ship on-board computer, "Holly", is capable of carrying on a large number of simultaneous conversations and computations, and obviously also knows many different human (and other) languages.' [Dominique Estival]

• Shooting Fish: '... is a British movie 3 to 5 years old. It is about two guys who do a lot of funny things in order to get rich. One of the things is a machine translation computer called VerbiTec. The computer basically is a laptop with a brick in it and two persons sitting in the basement doing the translation.' [Stefan Müller]

• Short Circuit: '... has a few robots speaking with commercially available speech synthesis programs, but, of course, the main robot is just an actor.' [Doug Whalen]

• Sneakers: '... with Robert Redford and Sidney Poitier has a really horrible use of speaker identification--I don't know if that is close enough for your purposes or not. But they end up breaking into a building with a recording that would almost certainly have failed miserably.' [Doug Whalen]

• Star Trek: 'What about looking at the Universal Translator in Star Trek and comparing it to machine translation efforts or problems in speech recognition? I can't think whether there's a particular episode or movie in which it's explicitly discussed (there must be, or else I wouldn't know it exists), but Suzette Haden Elgin's written some critiques of the use of such devices in SF literature/film, so there's some material from which to develop some 'talking points' ... apparently they used a hand-held UT in the Area episode of the original series. Not a movie, but moving pictures, at least. There's also a webpage dedicated to The linguistics of Star Trek, (basically mocking its inadequacies).' [Lynne Murphy]

  'I'd take any episode of any version of Star Trek (either movies or tv shows). From what I remember, most interactions with the computer on these movies (and shows) are in the form of requests or commands. The main aspect here is not the intelligence of the machine (like in 2001), but the fact that there is a natural language interaction between people and machines. The NLP aspect serves as a communication device in the same way as the keyboard/screen interaction. Plus, what makes it a little more plausible (as far as actual knowledge in AI goes) is that the computer usually answers using a somewhat limited syntax and there are instances of the computer requesting a re-phrasing of the request because of faulty syntax. Plus, the interesting point about this choice is that it is widely known.' [Alain Thériault]

• Star Wars: 'How about Star Wars where the robot C-3P0 is equiped with a machine translation system that processes several million languages? The architecture of this interglactic MT program is never specified. It would be interesting to know if it relies on pair-wise transfer or interlingual.' [Shalom Lappin]

  'Probably this won't help you much on your "Fact or Fiction" series, but what immediately came to my mind when reading your message on LINGUIST was that C3PO (the android - or whatever it is - in George Lucas' Star Wars) is a specialist in languages. Not only human languages, by the way. There is at least one passage in the third film of the series when his powers are put to a test, and he is regarded as a god of some kind by the natives ...' [Leonor Santos]

• The Day the Earth Stood Still: '... where the destructive robot is controlled by "magic" words, and there is wonderful linguistic/other technology.' [Nancy Frishberg]

• Three Days of the Condor: 'There is always the PDP-11 minicomputer doing optical character recognition/ text translation work at the beginning of the Robert Redford thriller "Three Days of the Condor"--a source of great amusement to those of us familiar with the little system and the field of natural language processing.' [Rich Alderson]

• 2001: '... has lots of speech recognition issues, lip reading (a special! case of pattern recognition), and so on. Plus David Stork's volume celebrating HAL in its/his birth year provides additional material for you and the rest of the faculty; see also http://matia.stanford.edu/~stork/HALTalks.html. Stork also produced the non-fiction PBS video "Hal's Legacy"' [Nancy Frishberg]

• UFO: '... text to speech: messages of the satellite SID.' [Michael Beer]

• Virtuosity: ... with Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe. There is a passage where the creator of the virtual characters explains that while the guy was talking to the software it is acquiring the syntax ... the software that becomes animated (Russell Crowe) speaks and understands perfect English.' [Leonardo Oliveira]

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Last Modified: 2nd June 2006