Is the used dataset with conversations available somewhere? What about the model architecture?
Student Team Wins Amazon Alexa Artificial Intelligence Challenge
41–48 of 48 posts
Re: Student Team Wins Amazon Alexa Artificial Intelligence Challenge
#42Glad to see my alma mater doing well. > Some of the distinguishing features of the bot included incorporating language disfluencies — pauses such as “hm” or “ah.” Note that Google recently faced backlash over this very feature demoed in their Virtual Assistant. I'm guessing that public sentiment won't last long, it's a natural part of human language and it feels funny when it's missing.
Each confrontation of the uncanny valley is an uncomfortable experience that gives us pause and causes us to consider the dangers of interacting with AI. It's a healthy learning experience that will linger with any part of the population that already distrusts AI. Since you probably want to sell to those people too, why not make allowances? Disfluencies and breath sounds are peculiar when they're missing from human s…
I think you're trying to project and are seeing more than what there really is.
For 99,9% of the people who have an issue with such things it's not about "oh, it's hiding very well as a human and could take over, I distrust AI more due to it".
It's about the uncanny valley problem of our brain being pattern matcher, and having difficulties classifying the AI using these new features as the "human pattern" or the "AI pattern" and so we don't like it / feel weirded out by it. Give it a few years and suddenly it has become part of the AI pattern and all is well.
I'm not saying distrust toward AI is growing or not growing, but that it doesn't even play at all in the public reaction to such AI features.
Re: Student Team Wins Amazon Alexa Artificial Intelligence Challenge
#43Glad to see my alma mater doing well. > Some of the distinguishing features of the bot included incorporating language disfluencies — pauses such as “hm” or “ah.” Note that Google recently faced backlash over this very feature demoed in their Virtual Assistant. I'm guessing that public sentiment won't last long, it's a natural part of human language and it feels funny when it's missing.
The worry was that people talking to Google's assistant over the phone might think they were talking to a person. Not so much a problem with an Alexa.
Re: Student Team Wins Amazon Alexa Artificial Intelligence Challenge
#44The Grand Challenge, of maintaining a coherent and engaging conversation for 20 minutes, still remains. As does a $1 million unrestricted gift which will be awarded to the winning team’s university, if their socialbot meets this challenge...
Re: Student Team Wins Amazon Alexa Artificial Intelligence Challenge
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or any stem subject.
Or any subject. Or the whole population. You see how ridiculous these questions are?
Rather, I think you were reading too much into the original statement. He talked about ML/AI because the threads are about ML/AI. He wasn't saying only ML/AI experienced this. His point was about ethnic population proportions and how it isn't strange that we see what we see. I wonder if the two of you actually agree with each other in reality.
Re: Student Team Wins Amazon Alexa Artificial Intelligence Challenge
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Each confrontation of the uncanny valley is an uncomfortable experience that gives us pause and causes us to consider the dangers of interacting with AI. It's a healthy learning experience that will linger with any part of the population that already distrusts AI. Since you probably want to sell to those people too, why not make allowances? Disfluencies and breath sounds are peculiar when they're missing from human s…
I think you're trying to project and are seeing more than what there really is. For 99,9% of the people who have an issue with such things it's not about "oh, it's hiding very well as a human and could take over, I distrust AI more due to it". It's about the uncanny valley problem of our brain being pattern matcher, and having difficulties classifying the AI using these new features as the "human pattern" or the "AI…
I hope I'm not projecting a distrust of simulacrum. I distrust other humans, not our tools. But I'm not oblivious to my bubble and people outside it that have no idea how these tools work or how others might use them to their direct/indirect disadvantage. People create stories to explain their losses and sometimes blame tools.
I understand the uncanny valley as a product of a pattern matching exercise that humans developed well before we encountered AI. A part of our "friend or foe", "like me or unlike me" mechanism. If a user considers the tool a "potential foe" (for instance, a customer service resolution bot) every shallow attempt by the tool to approximate "friend" could further alienating the user. I don't think the "weird feeling" just goes away at that point.
I'm also pretty sure that we're going to be in the uncanny valley for long enough to make use of that "weird feeling" for effect outside of fiction.
Re: Student Team Wins Amazon Alexa Artificial Intelligence Challenge
#47Weird that a university press release wouldn't make it easy to find actual details for work in question, but a few links deep you can find a paper on the winner:
https://s3.amazonaws.com/dex-microsites-prod/alexaprize/2018...
> Gunrock: Building A Human-Like Social Bot By Leveraging Large Scale Real User Data
Abstract:
> Gunrock is a social bot designed to engage users in open domain conversations. We improved our bot iteratively using large scale user interaction data to be more capable and human-like. Our system engaged in over 40, 000 conversations during the semi-finals period of the 2018 Alexa Prize. We developed a context-aware hierarchical dialog manager to handle a wide variety of user behaviors, such as topic switching and question answering. In addition, we designed a robust threestep natural language understanding module, which includes techniques such as sentence segmentation and automatic speech recognition (ASR) error correction. Furthermore, we improve the human-likeness of the system by adding prosodic speech synthesis. As a result of our many contributions and large scale user interactions analysis, we achieved an average score of 3.62 on a 1 − 5 Likert scale on Oct 14th. Additionally, we achieved an average of 22.14 number of turns and a 5.22 minutes conversation duration.
Re: Student Team Wins Amazon Alexa Artificial Intelligence Challenge
#48Glad to see my alma mater doing well. > Some of the distinguishing features of the bot included incorporating language disfluencies — pauses such as “hm” or “ah.” Note that Google recently faced backlash over this very feature demoed in their Virtual Assistant. I'm guessing that public sentiment won't last long, it's a natural part of human language and it feels funny when it's missing.
I have a challenge among my friends to order a sub at Subway without saying "um, "uhh" etc. It's fun and it always results in sounding like a robot or Shakespeare ordering a sandwich.