I wonder if this is in response to Google's open sourcing of Parsey McParseface: http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2016/05/announcing-syntax...
except this isn't open source.
DeepText: Facebook's text understanding engine
61–70 of 142 posts
Re: DeepText: Facebook's text understanding engine
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
What scares me about this is the "bubble" it creates, see [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble (even mentions Facebook's news-stream)
This is a slight tangent, but I don't even like the fact that what I see when I type something into Google may not be what others see. I think the inconvenience of having to type "order pizza in $city" rather than just "order pizza" is more than outweighed by not kind of destroying "consensus reality" as far as it pertains to search results, not to mention the potential for really creepy things down the line. It's no…
I read a paper on this recently in class and I think their findings were that most google results are the same other than geographically specific ones like you mentioned. For instance, if we both type "trump", most of the results will be the same unless there is a trump tower near you, in which case it'll direct you to it. Ordering of results however can change.
Re: DeepText: Facebook's text understanding engine
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find Google Now to be far more useful than e.g. Facebook "recommendations", which are basically ads.
Same, but google now for me is basically a mash of: 1. The weather 2. Stocks that have the same acronyms as things I've searched for 3. Flight information for any flight with the same code as mine 4. A recommendation of a film I might like to see because I searched for actors in them (which might be good except the reason I was looking up those actors was that I had just watched that film) 5. Sports scores for teams…
> 6. Possibly updates to sites I visit regularly (equivalent to a highly unreliable RSS client)
This is what annoys me the most in Google Now. It's a damn black box. I'm happy that they provide "updates to sites I visit regularly", but even more than those updates I'd like to see the list of those sites. Without that, and any kind of information about how reliable this reporting is, I have no way of trusting I won't miss an "important update". I just don't know, and Google Now does nothing to reassure me.
Re: DeepText: Facebook's text understanding engine
#64Yesterday I mentioned vodka to my wife in Facebook Messenger and a few minutes later she saw a vodka advertisement on her timeline. Obviously Messenger will never include end to end encryption.
People probably said the same about Google. And while Allo doesn't do E2E by default, it does include it as an option.
Re: DeepText: Facebook's text understanding engine
#65Would love to see a compare / contrast between FB/GOOG/MSFT's offerings in this space.
Re: DeepText: Facebook's text understanding engine
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
End-to-end encryption means the server doesn't know the content of the message. Only the clients, the end-points, have the decryption key.
And then the endpoints integrate with ad networks after they've distilled it into topics. I mean, my message contents are personal data. The topics "buy a bike" and "sell a bike" are not (I mean, not by themselves), so those you can transmit to ad companies. Now of course you need to make the detection lightweight enough that you don't need to talk to the server anymore, but that's just a matter of time. The person y…
I'm not so sure about that. If you were talking about subjects that might be disagreeable to people in your country, maybe it's sex toys or homosexuality, if those topics start coming up in ad networks then that's still going to be a problem.
Re: DeepText: Facebook's text understanding engine
#67Slightly contrarian, or maybe not-but is anyone else sort of fatigued with social media trying it's hardest to do it all for you? Algorithmic timelines telling me what happened while I was gone (trust me, twitter...I would have gotten to it eventually), prioritizing what shows up (trust me facebook, I do a very good job hiding content on my own), telling me what I ought to buy (trust me, Amazon if I wanted it-I'd eit…
What scares me about this is the "bubble" it creates, see [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble (even mentions Facebook's news-stream)
In my opinion the bigger problem is, when people are not aware that they're in a bubble. They existed, even before social media and internet searches. E.G. when I was a kid/teen, I got most of the information about the world from one local news paper and one evening news show on tv. Yes, their "newsfeed" wasn't generated by algorithms. But still, it's someone that decided for me what is relevant and what not. Nowadays I have access to much more sources and different point of views as long as I am aware that they exist and know it's up to me looking them up. Similar thing if your part of a strongly opinionated subculture. It is hard to even realize how limited your horizon might be.
So I try to embrace the bubble when it is useful for me. I appreciate that when I type "something something python" into google the top results are relavant to my work and not about snakes or comedians. But when I'm want to form a politcal opinion I use duckduckgo and activly look for contrary positions.
Re: DeepText: Facebook's text understanding engine
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
You aren't alone - I don't take well to unsolicited advice, unless it's about avoiding traffic :)
More often than not, Google Maps (I assume you're referring to) does about as good a guesstimate as any human in the area would. I'm starting to feel like some good old brains would serve us well sometimes. Take Google Maps' traffic again, it can tell me the traffic now. It can tell me expected traffic tomorrow. But it doesn't understand that if I depart at 8am and I arrive at 10am, then at 9am that traffic jam is wo…
The other thing that Google Maps could add, while we are talking about unsolicited advice and the human element of making traffic decisions, would be sports games. My commute at around 7PM is usually clear, unless there is a sports game, in which case it is a nightmare for a very specific period of time before the game. Further, a big team generates a sold old game which generates more traffic than a mid-week game against an out of division team. Would be fun to program although rather complex.
Re: DeepText: Facebook's text understanding engine
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think AlphaGo had a pretty good simulation of its human opponent, even though strategy and intuition are hard.
AlphaGo didn't simulate its opponent, it used the entire recorded history of Go games to extrapolate what is the best move to play in a particular situation (falling back to Monte-Carlo simulations of possible games after reducing the problem).
Game AI uses minmax decisions, so it does simulate the opponent to pick _their_ best move, then it picks the move that removes their best options. That's why it's so unsportsmanlike when losing and why it doesn't go for points when winning.
It doesn't have a specific profile of the opponent, though, instead it thinks they're another AlphaGo. That's an area they could work on.
Re: DeepText: Facebook's text understanding engine
#70Isn't "text understanding engine" a poor description of what is basically a classifier?
I'd expect a text understanding engine to do more than classify, I'd expect it to read a bunch of sentences in context and then be able to answer questions about it:
John was walking down the stairs. John tripped and fell. John lays on the floor.
Describe John's status: Is he hurt or in pain? Is he standing?