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Researchers reach human parity in conversational speech recognition

blogs.microsoft.com

61–70 of 164 posts

Re: Researchers reach human parity in conversational speech recognition

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can think of no better test of whether some specific being is intelligent than fooling another human into thinking they are. Can you think of a better one? > because it's a behavioral or functional test What else would you test for in an AI other than its output and behavior? Conversely: how would you test a human for intelligence other than through its output and behavior?

Surely that depends upon the human? An infant would do a terrible job. An institutionalized vegetable would fail to provide meaningful information. A not-very-bright cousin of mine has been heard responding to robo-calls. Would his opinion do? I think 'intelligence' is ambiguous, but many parts of it can be measured to some degree. Lets give the AI the SAT test perhaps? Or a test of hypothetical arguments. Or ask it…

> Anything that's even a little bit 'meta' would confound most 'AIs'. This is precisely why the Turing Test is so tricky for machines. Knowing the parameters, any regular human could test even the most advanced present-day AI and reveal it as a machine with very little effort and only a few questions.

> We can tell if an AI is functional in some environment or responds well to social queues by interacting with it. But not much else. Not how 'intelligent' it is for instance.

The Turing Test does not intend to determine level of intelligence (it's not an IQ test). It is intended to determine whether the intelligence you're interacting with is advanced enough to fool you into thinking they are of human nature.

It is not a test of degree of intelligence, but rather of its nature. Human / not human are the only two possible outcomes.

Re: Researchers reach human parity in conversational speech recognition

#62
post #2

I don't have a background in this area, so I'm likely easily impressed, but this seems really impressive. And the acknowledgement that there's a lot of work to be done, such as discriminating between speakers and recognition in adverse environments. Yeah, it's Microsoft writing on their own technology, but they addressed in the text the questions I had already in mind from just reading the title. It didn't leave me w…

> It's frustrating when technologies like image and speech recognition and robotics are conflated with AI.

Are you kidding? Of course these things are examples of artificial intelligence. I don't understand why people keep moving the goalposts wrt "AI".

Re: Researchers reach human parity in conversational speech recognition

#63
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is also true for pwople. How do you know humans are thinking and not following lots of social rules they learn thanks to special neural hardware for learning social interaction? Think about the intelligence conveyed in ritualized greetings.

You are recapitulating Descartes. Consciousness appears to be immeasurable. You can only know that you are conscious. It is polite to give others the benefit of doubt.

You can know that you are conscious, but how do you know you are intelligent?

Re: Researchers reach human parity in conversational speech recognition

#64
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious, what is your definition of AI?

A machine process qualifies as AI if it believes in a god. EDIT: I see the nuances of epistemological problems are lost to HN and knee-jerk culture war atheism still rules supreme.

This is 2016, people don't believe in gods anymore. It'd have to believe in the paleo diet instead.

Re: Researchers reach human parity in conversational speech recognition

#65
post #60

The term "human parity" refers to a comparison of the error rate, which is a single scalar summarizing performance in terms of mistakes made. It says nothing about the kind of mistakes, and I can easily imagine that machines qualitatively do not make at all the same kind of mistakes as humans. I'd be curious to know if the kind of mistakes machines make might strike human listeners as quite stupid, but maybe not.. ma…

Section 9 in the paper[1] is all about comparing these mistakes between the system and humans. The most common mistakes for humans and the system are in tables 9—11. We find that the artificial errors are substantially the same as human ones with one large exception confusions between backchannel words [acknowledgment words like “uh-huh”] and hesitations . The difference they found, but suspect might be a result of t…

Very cool that they investigated this! Thanks, I hadn't read the paper (obviously)

Re: Researchers reach human parity in conversational speech recognition

#67
post #3

The actual paper has a section on error analysis that is particularly enlightening: https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.05256 On the CallHome dataset humans confuse words 4.1% of the time, but delete 6.5% of words, most commonly deleting the word "I". Their ASR system confuses 6.5% of words on this dataset, but only deletes 3.3% of words, so depending on how you view this their claim about being better than humans isn't defin…

I was recently at a bar where they showed a movie with incomprehensible subtitles (English to English). I assume this was because they skimped and bought automatic subtitling. I think one important aspect is while humans miss words, they often get the sentence meaning correct. When computers miss words, they tend to substitute words that sound similar. That's readable if you have time but not necessarily as a stream…

> I was recently at a bar where they showed a movie with incomprehensible subtitles (English to English). I assume this was because they skimped and bought automatic subtitling.

I don't think that is possible. Like, worse subtitling isn't even an option.

Re: Researchers reach human parity in conversational speech recognition

#68
post #19

Very nice. How long before something this good is available as open source? A tough test would be to hook this up to a police/fire scanner, or air traffic control radio.

They did post the code on github ( https://github.com/Microsoft/CNTK ) with the Microsoft open source license. Presumably you could feed it speech from a running instance of gnu-radio.

CNTK is just a toolkit, like tensorflow or theano. Code for the paper was not published.

Re: Researchers reach human parity in conversational speech recognition

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A machine process qualifies as AI if it believes in a god. EDIT: I see the nuances of epistemological problems are lost to HN and knee-jerk culture war atheism still rules supreme.

ELIZA could be made to believe in God.

Bash script can be made to believe in god. )

Re: Researchers reach human parity in conversational speech recognition

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was recently at a bar where they showed a movie with incomprehensible subtitles (English to English). I assume this was because they skimped and bought automatic subtitling. I think one important aspect is while humans miss words, they often get the sentence meaning correct. When computers miss words, they tend to substitute words that sound similar. That's readable if you have time but not necessarily as a stream…

> I was recently at a bar where they showed a movie with incomprehensible subtitles (English to English). I assume this was because they skimped and bought automatic subtitling. I don't think that is possible. Like, worse subtitling isn't even an option.

"Trainspotting" would be an interesting challenge: " rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/may/31/irvinewelsh>
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