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A Simple AI Capable of Basic Reading Comprehension

blog.ayoungprogrammer.com

21–30 of 64 posts

Re: A Simple AI Capable of Basic Reading Comprehension

#21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're the current hip thing because they work really well and keep working better. They take a fundamentally different (I think better) approach than he's taking. My recommendation comes from a more informed place than "Dur, neural networks!" Of course, this is my opinion, and you are welcome to have a different one. What is your recommendation on the topic of most promising research areas for teaching reading comp…

I think the strength lies in combining NNs with less fuzzy approaches (like the OP, or more explicit pattern matching). Coulda made that a bit clearer, I have to admit. Cuz who would want to spend an hour training their net on a big GPU for every new command they add? :P To take a concrete example: we trust neural networks to do the handwriting recognition at the postal office, but once the address is digitized we us…

>> I think the strength lies in combining NNs with less fuzzy approaches

Haha, I think you'll find the deep learning camp agrees. Read the paper I posted, that's what the research is about (going from fuzzy knowledge to more specific/discrete knowledge.)

Re: A Simple AI Capable of Basic Reading Comprehension

#22
The difference between this graph and propositional logic is only that the predicates joining concepts are arbitrary instead of logic operators. In that sense, this is like Google Knowledge Graph / Freebase.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propositional_calculus#Solvers

Solving a set of propositional logic statements is NP-Complete. I'd argue "reading comprehension" is actually knowing the state of the world after a piece of text, which requires solving how these predicates interact. For example, if the paragraph is

  Bobby picked up the toy. Then he put down the toy.
This "semantic memory" does not "comprehend" where the toy is, and this is a relatively simple example. I think the title "basic reading comprehension" is thus inaccurate. Perhaps a better title is "A simple knowledge graph" or "A simple semantic memory"

Re: A Simple AI Capable of Basic Reading Comprehension

#23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the strength lies in combining NNs with less fuzzy approaches (like the OP, or more explicit pattern matching). Coulda made that a bit clearer, I have to admit. Cuz who would want to spend an hour training their net on a big GPU for every new command they add? :P To take a concrete example: we trust neural networks to do the handwriting recognition at the postal office, but once the address is digitized we us…

>> I think the strength lies in combining NNs with less fuzzy approaches Haha, I think you'll find the deep learning camp agrees. Read the paper I posted, that's what the research is about (going from fuzzy knowledge to more specific/discrete knowledge.)

It's interesting stuff. Don't really see why you were being so dismissive towards OP tho.

Re: A Simple AI Capable of Basic Reading Comprehension

#25

I was intrigued by the initial transcript, but disappointed that it was edited (lightly). For the question "Why did Mary cheer?" the screenshot showed that the simple AI literally answered "because IT be HER FIRST TIME WINNING". This is correct, but the author edited it into a correct sentence for us. I think it is too much to call this "capable of basic reading comprehension". Surely, "simple sentence parser can ans…

> I was intrigued by the initial transcript, but disappointed that it was edited (lightly). For the question "Why did Mary cheer?" the screenshot showed that the simple AI literally answered "because IT be HER FIRST TIME WINNING". This is correct, but the author edited it into a correct sentence for us.

For some reason, the library I used to get the present tense of "was" is "be". I had a manually fix for this but accidentally removed it when I was cleaning up the code. Sorry if I disappointed you

> I think it is too much to call this "capable of basic reading comprehension". Surely, "simple sentence parser can answer reading comprehension questions" would be more correct?

I would say it is capable of basic reading comprehension because it is attempts to build relationships between different objects although the relationships are weak. When humans do reading comprehension, we do what my program does which is try to parse the sentence and understand the relationships. But brains are also able to augment a lot more information and thus be more flexible with understanding.

> Would you say that 14-line Perl program is capable of basic reading comprehension? I wouldn't!

I would say it is not because it does not understanding the relation between objects; it only understands that sentences starting with "why" should be answered with everything after the string "because". Also, in your program, if there are two instances of "because" in the source, your program will only choose the first one.

Re: A Simple AI Capable of Basic Reading Comprehension

#26
post #14

I love the ambition. But when you stated your next goals, I'm afraid I thought of this: http://xkcd.com/1425/ I may very well be wrong, and I'd love it if you showed me I am. Good luck. As I said, I really would be excited to see this go farther.

When was that xkcd posted? - couldn't not find a date. Since machine vision is such a fast moving field, I think date is relevant for understanding the context of this xkcd. Is image recognition of a bird so inconceivable at the moment? Perhaps the joke now would be - "I'll need one researcher and one year"

You are taking the xkcd strip very literally instead of understanding the central concept on it.

You comment reminds me of this: http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi879.htm

Re: A Simple AI Capable of Basic Reading Comprehension

#27

The difference between this graph and propositional logic is only that the predicates joining concepts are arbitrary instead of logic operators. In that sense, this is like Google Knowledge Graph / Freebase. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propositional_calculus#Solvers Solving a set of propositional logic statements is NP-Complete. I'd argue "reading comprehension" is actually knowing the state of the world after a pi…

> Bobby picked up the toy. Then he put down the toy.

When we read this sentence, our brains automatically augment additional information based on the verb. However, in this example, my program will fail to answer because my program does not augment any additional information but it can be extended to.

This can be implemented in our program by created a new property for each object called "location". If a verb is location based, we can set the location of the object based on what the verb describes. For example, "the toy"'s location could be "Bobby's hands" after the first sentence based on the verb phrase "pick up". So the program will understand where the toy is and be able to understand queries related to "where".

As you can imagine, implementing this would be very tedious since there are too many cases for all the verbs. My program may not be able to do advanced reading comprehension (reading between lines and augmenting information) but I argue that it can do simple reading comprehension, in that it can understand the relationship between objects. There is still a long way to go before my program is capable of more sophisticated reading comprehension, but in theory, I think my approach seems possible.

Re: A Simple AI Capable of Basic Reading Comprehension

#28
post #4
post #3

I think the AI should do more than just correlate some verbs. It should also be capable of understanding concepts like. If I give the following: "John and I are brothers. My mother has a brother named James. " And we ask: "What is the name of my uncle?" The initial results are great but in my humble opinion the big quest is to make computer learn concepts.

You obviously sound like you're interested! Why not fork the repo, contribute? :) It's a great demo project, and I love seeing these on HN. OP - Instead of linking directly to en/Stanford Parser etc, you should get together a list of dependencies people need to run your application. Usually as easy as 'pip install pattern' (for the 'ImportError: No module named en') which is `import pattern.en` :-) I like it! It's ne…

> It's a great demo project, and I love seeing these on HN.

Thanks!

> OP - Instead of linking directly to en/Stanford Parser etc, you should get together a list of dependencies people need to run your application. Usually as easy as 'pip install pattern' (for the 'ImportError: No module named en') which is `import pattern.en` :-)

I didn't actually pip install anything for my project, I just downloaded and extracted the Stanford Parser, and Nodebox Linguistics libraries. The setup should be in the readme. I'll try to see if I can find the pip dependencies and update the readme.

Re: A Simple AI Capable of Basic Reading Comprehension

#29
post #14

I love the ambition. But when you stated your next goals, I'm afraid I thought of this: http://xkcd.com/1425/ I may very well be wrong, and I'd love it if you showed me I am. Good luck. As I said, I really would be excited to see this go farther.

When was that xkcd posted? - couldn't not find a date. Since machine vision is such a fast moving field, I think date is relevant for understanding the context of this xkcd. Is image recognition of a bird so inconceivable at the moment? Perhaps the joke now would be - "I'll need one researcher and one year"

Yeah, Randy was a bit miscalculating the estimate there. Within a month of that comic, flickr made http://code.flickr.net/2014/10/20/introducing-flickr-park-or...

Re: A Simple AI Capable of Basic Reading Comprehension

#30

I love the ambition. But when you stated your next goals, I'm afraid I thought of this: http://xkcd.com/1425/ I may very well be wrong, and I'd love it if you showed me I am. Good luck. As I said, I really would be excited to see this go farther.

Using Word2Vec or better yet, what it was based on, https://www.kaggle.com/c/word2vec-nlp-tutorial/forums/t/1234... might make this possible and would be a good approach toward achieving future goals.

Take a look at text sentiment analyzers and processors that employ advanced machine learning algorithms like this too, http://52.10.12.34/TuataraSum

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