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DeepText: Facebook's text understanding engine

code.facebook.com

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Re: DeepText: Facebook's text understanding engine

#71

Post by Programmatic »

smoe wrote: post #67
amelius wrote: post #36

Earlier 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)

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. Nowaday…

> 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.

I have a hard time feeling like it's helping me when I get filter bubbled; I feel like I'm more productive and on point when I know where I am in relation to the rest of the world for whatever reason. The feeling when you learn what to search to get the desired specialized results instead of other general usages by adding keywords or going to sites that are more specialized themselves (e.g. stackoverflow where you can search [r] to search posts tagged with "r" in particular) is wonderful. You opt in to a bubble of a particular sort versus not knowing what else there is out there. I tend to feel a bit... disgusted with Google deciding what's good for me during a given search.

Re: DeepText: Facebook's text understanding engine

#72

Post by zardeh »

astrange wrote: post #69
cyphar wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

AG doesn't actually use minimax, it uses montecarlo tree search, which doesn't even try to simulate a good opponent, it just plays lots of games very fast.

Re: DeepText: Facebook's text understanding engine

#73

Post by sgnelson »

morgante wrote: post #38
iamdave wrote: post #2

Slightly 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…

> I have no mistakes that these features are probably loved by some, maybe even most, but more and more Count me in the camp that loves them. I don't want to spend hours a day keeping up with social activity. Facebook does a great job of giving me a quick summary of everything going on in my friends' lives by sorting through all the drivel algorithmically.

"...summary of everything going on in my friends' lives by sorting through all the drivel algorithmically."

Sounds like you really care a lot [0].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1g9PFtSCKw

Re: DeepText: Facebook's text understanding engine

#74

Post by Programmatic »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #63
IanCal wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I may be assuming ill intent where there is none, but I feel like that's part of the plan of the entities (Google, FaceBook) that automate recommendations: get you to discard that nagging feeling like you're missing something of actual importance, and just get your info from the feed. If I were nefarious and had their real estate, I would certainly like to not be transparent so that I could manipulate things without people being able to tell or complain.

Re: DeepText: Facebook's text understanding engine

#75

Post by ma2rten »

lucb1e wrote: post #51
shamino wrote: post #3

Earlier 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…

People promote machine learning and neural nets and all sorts of automated training in situations where some research and an if statement or five would have worked as well.

As a Machine Learning Engineer / Data Scientist I would always evaluate my model against a baseline (in this case the if statements) and only put the model in production if it outperforms the baseline.

Re: DeepText: Facebook's text understanding engine

#77

Post by renaudg »

tdkl wrote: post #5
iamdave wrote: post #2

Slightly 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…

> is anyone else sort of fatigued with social media trying it's hardest to do it all for you Yes, because they're not doing it for us, but for themselves, investors and customers (advertisers) fueled by our data.

Could Facebook be doing so well because this is actually a win-win situation for everyone involved ?

That includes the people you mentioned yes, but also users who get to use a valuable tool for free.

The whole "if it's free, you are the product" party line may resonate in HN circles, but you have to realize the public as a whole doesn't think it's a bad deal at all.

Re: DeepText: Facebook's text understanding engine

#78

Post by lucb1e »

chillacy wrote: post #66
lucb1e wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh, shit, I made one fatal mistake writing that post: it now sounds like I agree with it.

This is just how marketing would sell these features to the world (end to end encryption, and yet targeted ads), but disclosing each topic I ever discuss with a given person is still private in my opinion.

I've edited my post's original text slightly, adding a bigger edit at the bottom.

Re: DeepText: Facebook's text understanding engine

#79

Post by renaudg »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #22
zastrowm wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't use facebook, but couldn't that also be an optimization? Like don't send the user email notifications if they're already on the site where they can see the # of notifications?

But that's not what they're doing. I'll get mentioned in a comment while I'm on the site. I'll click over and read the comment and reply to it. Then, once I'm away from the computer for 30-60 seconds or so (I'm sure they have a system training for this), I get the email notification -- even if the original back-and-forth occurred an hour ago. The timing of when I get the email has nothing at all to do with when the e…

This sounds like a bug / coincidence.

I've never got a later email about something that happened live while I was browsing the site, and was already notified about.

Re: DeepText: Facebook's text understanding engine

#80

Post by aab0 »

cromwellian wrote: post #70

Isn'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?

Deep learning can do question-answering.
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