DeepText: Facebook's text understanding engine • Hacker News Board

Re: DeepText: Facebook's text understanding engine

#101

Post by jheriko » Thu, Jun 02, 2016, 6:17 AM UTC

zardeh wrote: post #72

astrange wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

its even more than that of course... the network has to poke its fingers in somewhere, i'd be guessing it prunes those trees - so it is a bit more than playing lots of games really fast

Re: DeepText: Facebook's text understanding engine

#102

Post by rspeer » Thu, Jun 02, 2016, 6:19 AM UTC

goldenkey wrote: post #59

School-Cotton wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know the battery drain was caused by CPU usage, as opposed to something like network?

I had checked the statistics on the Play Framework service that it ran under. There was abnormally high CPU usage, high battery usage, and it was running all the time.

Lots of apps use the Play Framework, not just Google Now.

Re: DeepText: Facebook's text understanding engine

#103

Post by jheriko » Thu, Jun 02, 2016, 6:20 AM UTC

morgante wrote: post #60

PavlovsCat wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Facebook does a great job of giving me a quick summary of everything going on in my friends' lives The only way you can actually know that is to compare the summary with the raw data. The only way to remain sure of it is to keep doing that.

The "raw data" in this case is my friends' lives. Based on my (off-Facebook) interactions with them I remain confident that Facebook does a good job of keeping me up to date on their lives when I use it.

i can tell you first hand that it does an awful job with my collection of facebook friends. it doesn't prioritise the people i care about most or even the things nearest to me... and more than once has absolutely polluted my feed with someone to the point i considered phoning them to explain why i was about to unfriend them.

i'm not saying your experience is untrue... just that facebook haven't done a great job of this for everyone at all.

Re: DeepText: Facebook's text understanding engine

#104

Post by microtonal » Thu, Jun 02, 2016, 6:23 AM UTC

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.

In my experience, Facebook primarily shows me boring memes (probably because they get liked/shared a lot) and often buries generally interesting news (births, etc.).

By the way, I believe that some filtering might be necessary. It seems that when I joined Facebook there were far fewer memes and 'folklore' posts (we have a nice word for that in Dutch: 'tegeltjeswijsheid'). But that would be a user-trained filter, which is not interesting to Facebook.

So, I agree with both camps: we need filtering, but Facebook's filtering is rarely good, because it's not aligned with my interests.

Re: DeepText: Facebook's text understanding engine

#105

Post by zardeh » Thu, Jun 02, 2016, 6:27 AM UTC

ylem wrote: post #81

zardeh wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Actually, the cool thing about AG is that it doesn't just use MCTS, but that it adds in deep learning and reinforcement learning :-) I was surprised by how readable their paper was! Here's a link: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v529/n7587/full/nature1... I think you search on the title, you can find probably find a non paywalled version.

Yup! Their additions to the algorithm are actually super simple, it was really surprising to me, its just very computationally intensive on the front end.

Re: DeepText: Facebook's text understanding engine

#106

Post by zardeh » Thu, Jun 02, 2016, 6:28 AM UTC

zodiac wrote: post #99

zardeh wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

AG does use minimax in the same sense that for example stockfish does (bounded depth and with pruning)

But that isn't minimax, its pruning by some evaluation function, where in this case the evaluation function is "blackbox Deep neural net trained on many games"

Re: DeepText: Facebook's text understanding engine

#107

Post by goldenkey » Thu, Jun 02, 2016, 6:29 AM UTC

rspeer wrote: post #102

goldenkey wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had checked the statistics on the Play Framework service that it ran under. There was abnormally high CPU usage, high battery usage, and it was running all the time.

Lots of apps use the Play Framework, not just Google Now.

I am aware. But consider that I literally disabled/enabled it with intent to discover if it was the problem. It was. Google Now is a huge drain. Googling it turns up thousands of other similar experiences unfortunately. [1]

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=%22google+now%22+cards+causi...

Re: DeepText: Facebook's text understanding engine

#108

Post by SanderMak » Thu, Jun 02, 2016, 6:37 AM UTC

msie wrote: post #27

devindotcom wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heh yeah I wrote about this a while back - http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/27/facebooks-categorial-impera... But you add human intelligence to this kind of thing and it starts getting creepily accurate much of the time if you're looking to promote certain behaviors, expose others, or what have you.

On yesterday's episode of POI a character said that the Machine (an AI) has to contain a simulation of a person in order to understand what that person will do.

That idea is beautifully explored in this episode of Black Mirror: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Christmas_%28Black_Mirro...

Re: DeepText: Facebook's text understanding engine

#109

Post by tomc1985 » Thu, Jun 02, 2016, 6:55 AM UTC

dclowd9901 wrote: post #90

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…

You also risk exposing yourself merely to an echo chamber as everything is automatically self reinforcing. This is bad stuff -- socially manipulative dark patterns.

This is almost exactly what it feels like FB and much of the web (even some of HN!) has become/is becoming.

Re: DeepText: Facebook's text understanding engine

#110

Post by justsaysmthng » Thu, Jun 02, 2016, 6:56 AM UTC

> Understanding the various ways text is used on Facebook can help us improve people's experiences with our products

You mean show us more "relevant" ads ? Last time I checked, Facebook's *product" was advertising. Thanks, this is exactly what I miss in my life - more ads for products and services I don't need.

So excited that Facebook is going to understand everything I'm talking about privately with my "friends" and sell my identity to more ad buyers, who'll design more subliminal ads to squeeze the last millisecond of what's left of my attention span.