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BC-COMPUTER 2takes
By COLIN CAMPBELL
c.1984 N.Y. Times News Service
    CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - A computer whose makers say it marks an advance
in artificial intelligence is gaining wide use among publishers,
linguists, legislators and others who put it to work ''reading''
documents and storing large amounts of information.
    What sets the machine apart from other computers is its ability to
recognize letters and numbers in a great variety of typefaces,
according to users of the machine as well as its developers. This
task, which comes easily to literate people, is more than
conventional computers can muster.
    The computer optically examines all sorts of letters for their
pattern before recording them at a rate of up to 70 characters a
second. The device, developed by Kurzweil Computer Products Inc. of
Cambridge, has been available since 1978, but it has come into wider
use since February, when a smaller and more efficient model was
released.
    The new model costs $35,000, a third of the 1983 price, and has
encouraged its developers to think that they are ahead in one part of
the worldwide competition to produce computers that can behave like
thinking people.
    Essentially, the Kurzweil Data Entry Machine performs a clerical
task that can be done fairly inexpensively by typists. But as more
companies and researchers have decided that they need larger banks of
computerized texts, the appeal of the machine has grown.
    In South Carolina, one Kurzweil machine is reading and storing a
flood of typewritten speeches at the State Legislature. The
University of Texas Law School uses one to record cases and make them
available to students who search for precedents at computer terminals.
    A Boston publisher, G.K. Hall, is using a Kurzweil scanner to record
the contents of books that it reprints by computer in large-type
editions for the visually impaired.
    General Motors and a number of technical consulting concerns use the
machines for constant revision of technical manuals. Still others are
scanning newspapers and magazines and feeding material to the
computerized Nexis news information network.
    At an experimental project at the University of Pennsylvania
financed by the Defense Department, a special machine that has been
programmed to recognize more exotic symbols than the Latin alphabet
is reading Azerbaijani-language newspapers printed in a nonstandard
version of the Cyrillic alphabet. Azerbaijaini is a Turkic dialect
spoken by several million people in Soviet Azerbaijan and adjacent
areas of Iran and Afghanistan.
    Three years ago the Defense Department got Kurzweil to develop
programs for reading the Cyrillic alphabet, in which Russian and a
few other languages are written. Several such machines are believed
by Kurzweil's officers to be scanning Soviet documents for the
federal government.
    A spokesman for the National Security Agency said by telephone from
Washington that the intelligence-gathering agency possessed ''at
least one'' Kurzweil scanner but declined to give further details.
    Spokesmen for the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense
Intelligence Agency refused to say whether their agencies used the
machines. The CIA spokesman added, however, that its technical staff
knew about Kurzweil's computers and found them ''interesting.''
    The machine at the University of Pennsylvania is being used to read
and store in its memory texts in several languages besides
Azerbaijaini, according to John Fought, the associate professor of
linguistics who heads the project.
    ''So far as I know, this is the first application of sophisticated
optical scanning to the study of linguistics,'' Fought said in a
telephone interview. Other languages that the project is scanning
include Somali, Slovenian and a Mayan Indian language, Chorti, which
is spoken in parts of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.
    The project's aims are to develop computer programs with which to
create large computerized language files as quickly as possible, to
write other programs that will help analyze languages and help create
grammars and dictionaries, and to expand computer-based language
instruction.
    Fought said linguists have traditionally relied on small samples of
literature for making generalizations about languages.
''Ultimately,'' he said, ''we want to use this system to up the ante,
to make the reliance on large amounts of data the rule.''
    The intellectual key to machines that ''read,'' according to Raymond
C. Kurzweil, the company's founder, is ''to abstract the properties
of letters'' and to describe them mathematically. This task is quite
different from programming simpler optical computers to recognize
particular typefaces or the precise lines drawn on food packages at
supermarkets.
    The letter A, no matter what type style it is printed in, has a hole
near the top, a northwest wing, a northeast wing and a crossbar. ''It
has a southern concavity and there are no northeast or northwest
concavities,'' said Kurzweil, a 36-year-old graduate of the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology who grew up in New York.
    The operator sits at an ordinary-looking computer terminal and
places the document to be read on the glass top of a metal box about
the size of an office refrigerator. A moving camera under the glass
begins tracking several lines at a time from right to left as well as
left to right.
    Words start popping up on the screen in front of the operator, who
then trains the computer to recognize the type face being scanned.
When something looks garbled, or if the computer indicates it has
little confidence in its decision to call something an E, say, the
operator tells the computer to display an enlarged photographic image
of the doubtful letter on the screen. The operator then types an
instruction on the computer keyboard that tells the computer whether
or not it should consider such letters E's.
    Officers of Kurzweil Computer Products, which was purchased by Xerox
in 1980, say that recently they have been selling two dozen machines
a month as against a half-dozen a month last year.
    
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