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

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

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As others have said, there's the pluralization of "peanut[s]" to distinguish between the two. This is a useful feature of English: the adjective-like role of a noun in a complex noun phrase is (almost?) always singular. - Computer engineer - NOT computers* engineer - Toothbrush - NOT teethbrush* - Foot doctor - NOT feet* doctor - Alarm clock - NOT alarms* clock, even when it supports multiple alarms! Additionally, th…

Alexa, please tell me about the... Attorneys general Senators elect Ahhhhhhh!

The difference is that these are phrases with adjectives, not nouns being used adjectivally.

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

#103
post #62

In text parsing, this whole machine learning would be implemented as "ignore white space as delimiter" ( that's how I implemented it on one of my projects) Ps. I'm aware this will not be a popular comment

Sentences spoken aloud don't have commas.

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

#104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, what is it? I imagine lists with post-specifiers are near impossible to parse too: Coffee, instant Custard, powdered Sugar Bit contrived, but still.

I see your point for longer lists, but most humans would correctly interpret "Hey, add coffee cream to my shopping list" as one item rather than two.

Assuming most cultures have "coffee cream" in their common vernacular seems risky. I've never heard of it.

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

#107

Great. Is "milk chocolate" one item or two?

and what would you add in this sentence:

"Alexa add paper towels milk and eggs to my shopping list" (punctuation intentionally left out)

It's a really cool problem to try and solve, and while I don't have an Alexa, I do have a google home which gets this kind of stuff right often enough that I don't really think about it any more (and kind of laugh on the rare chance it gets it wrong).

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

#108
post #75

I implemented a similar BiLSTM-CRF model at my current job. The architecture itself is really interesting, but runs into scaling issues. With LSTMs, you run into the constraint of having to wait on previous inputs and cache those results as well. Although TensorFlow now offers Cuda RNNS and fused kernels to speed up computation, I'd have thought for Amazon's scale, an attention/transformer based architcture would ser…

Spot on. Just a heads up, there is a decent amount of work on using convolutions to condense the initial representations and can reduce computation time equal to your max pooling. A lot of these tasks can be done via hyperparameter search over CNNs, so you can easily reach parity using a CNN-LSTM approach w/ the same number of parameters.

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

#109
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see your point for longer lists, but most humans would correctly interpret "Hey, add coffee cream to my shopping list" as one item rather than two.

Assuming most cultures have "coffee cream" in their common vernacular seems risky. I've never heard of it.

This. I'd assume it's like "creamer" which is a fake milk substitute from USA I think? But, it could be coffee flavoured cream; or "coffee creams" which are biscuits in the UK, or maybe some sort of confection?

Yeah, I should just look it up ...

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