Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How Alexa knows “peanut butter” is one shopping-list item, not two

developer.amazon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 147 posts

Re: How Alexa knows “peanut butter” is one shopping-list item, not two

#31

Post by taeric »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #28
blattimwind wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

State of the art virtual assistants offer little intelligence over a command line interface, except instead of typing the command line in, you say it. Besides that, not much difference; the syntax is rigid and the computer doesn't understand your utterance more intelligently than GCC understands "gcc -o my_prog my_prog.c".

My girlfriend routinely asks questions with convoluted grammar and gets a relevant response much of the time. I'm always amazed when it happens.

Examples? I seem to constantly get nothing from simple grammar questions. :(

Re: How Alexa knows “peanut butter” is one shopping-list item, not two

#33

Post by Quai »

wil421 wrote: post #17
SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say it was probably worse in this respect, doesn't German have a lot more of these "compound" words that would need to be parsed in this way?

Exactly, car insurance is much better than Kraftfahrzeug-Haftpflichtversicherung.

If you want to make German look bad, sure, but a "better" translation of car insurance would be Autoversicherung.

I mean, "car insurance" is much better than "motor vehicle liability insurance" too.. ;-)

Re: How Alexa knows “peanut butter” is one shopping-list item, not two

#34

Post by _emacsomancer_ »

taeric wrote: post #30
entity345 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would disagree here. Especially in the context of a shopping list. If I were to say 'peanut' 'butter' my interlocutor would probably interrupt me to ask for confirmation because that would be enough to create doubt. 'Peanut' and 'butter' are two unrelated words and it is the absence of pause that creates a pseudo single word. Pauses are extremely important in spoken language and should be exploited.

I think the catch is that human detection of pauses is far more fraught with difficulty than you'd imagine. Overly emphasized pauses are easy to discern, but quite a lot of speech pulls words far closer together than you would think. And this is just in english. Not all languages work with emphasis syllables and such.

Exactly, and the difference of the length of pauses between 'syntactic' words (peanut, butter) and between compounded words (peanut-butter) will vary based on speaker and moreover, things like focus/emphasis can cause lengthening of pauses even for the latter case. ("No, Alexa, I'm not shopping for Whistler's Mother; I need to buy PEANUT BUTTER.")

Re: How Alexa knows “peanut butter” is one shopping-list item, not two

#35

Post by akira2501 »

stan_rogers wrote: post #20
quirkot wrote: post #13

This only a surprising thing because a human would parse the waveform as two words and then back into a single concept. A computer could parse it as a single concept directly or in syllable lengthed chunks to be reconfigured however.

A human really wouldn't. It's the same thing as telling the difference between black bird and blackbird in running speech; peanut butter may be spelled as two words, but it's spoken as a single thing. If the concept was new enough that you were consciously talking about a type of butter made from (of all things) peanuts , it would be a black bird vocal entity rather than a blackbird one.

It's true that we do alter our speech to provide context clues, it is also true that without them we're _still_ capable of piecing them together.

If someone says in a unnaturally drawn out way "I like peanut butter sandwhiches" then I will have no problem detecting the situation and then re-parsing it correctly.

Re: How Alexa knows “peanut butter” is one shopping-list item, not two

#36

Post by theoh »

stan_rogers wrote: post #20
quirkot wrote: post #13

This only a surprising thing because a human would parse the waveform as two words and then back into a single concept. A computer could parse it as a single concept directly or in syllable lengthed chunks to be reconfigured however.

A human really wouldn't. It's the same thing as telling the difference between black bird and blackbird in running speech; peanut butter may be spelled as two words, but it's spoken as a single thing. If the concept was new enough that you were consciously talking about a type of butter made from (of all things) peanuts , it would be a black bird vocal entity rather than a blackbird one.

I get the impression that US English pronunciation runs the words "peanut butter" together much more that "international" English does.

Re: How Alexa knows “peanut butter” is one shopping-list item, not two

#37

Post by PascLeRasc »

taeric wrote: post #31
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My girlfriend routinely asks questions with convoluted grammar and gets a relevant response much of the time. I'm always amazed when it happens.

Examples? I seem to constantly get nothing from simple grammar questions. :(

I use a Google Home, not Alexa, but I ask it oddly-worded things all the time. Here's two from the past week that worked: "Can you see if Reply All has a new episode and if so play it?" "Can I still use these green peppers I got two weeks ago?"

Re: How Alexa knows “peanut butter” is one shopping-list item, not two

#38

Post by ghaff »

entity345 wrote: post #27
IshKebab wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Far more important than the lack of a pause between then words is the a priori fact that "peanut butter" is a common single item and "peanut, butter" is an uncommon list of items. It is that fact that means that you require a pause between the words to indicate "peanut, butter". If you ordered "butter, peanuts" for example, it would probably get that it was two items even without the pause between words. It's all abo…

I would disagree here. Especially in the context of a shopping list. If I were to say 'peanut' 'butter' my interlocutor would probably interrupt me to ask for confirmation because that would be enough to create doubt. 'Peanut' and 'butter' are two unrelated words and it is the absence of pause that creates a pseudo single word. Pauses are extremely important in spoken language and should be exploited.

>If I were to say 'peanut' 'butter' my interlocutor would probably interrupt me

I'm on the parent's side on this. "Peanut butter" is such a common item that if someone were to pause in between the words I would assume they just got distracted for some reason. In the context of a shopping list, "peanut" singular just doesn't make sense.

A better example would be something like "yogurt ice cream" which is technically incorrect but it's still something people might say. In that case, I'd expect a shorter pause than in the case of yogurt, ice cream. However, if you were dictating a list to me I'd probably ask for confirmation in either case because there's enough ambiguity.

Re: How Alexa knows “peanut butter” is one shopping-list item, not two

#39

Post by adrianmonk »

IshKebab wrote: post #24
entity345 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well this is not the key indicator. The key indicator is the absence of pause between the words, that's how we differentiate between "peanut butter" and "peanut, butter".

Far more important than the lack of a pause between then words is the a priori fact that "peanut butter" is a common single item and "peanut, butter" is an uncommon list of items. It is that fact that means that you require a pause between the words to indicate "peanut, butter". If you ordered "butter, peanuts" for example, it would probably get that it was two items even without the pause between words. It's all abo…

I don't see why they can't both be important signals. I would hazard a guess that a combined approach is what humans do.

I'm not a linguist or anything, but it seems like in practice people may pronounce "peanut butter" a little differently when they say the two words together. Something like "peanubutter". Or maybe they convert the "t" in "peanut" into a glottal stop.

Anyway, if the "t" is absent when you're talking about peanut butter but present when you're talking about two separate items, I don't see why you shouldn't feel free to use that signal. But I also don't see why you shouldn't use probabilities as well.

Post reply on HN