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DeepText: Facebook's text understanding engine

code.facebook.com

11–20 of 142 posts

Re: DeepText: Facebook's text understanding engine

#12
post #11

Are they going to open source it so that everyone else can use DeepText?

It seems like a lot of big companies are open sourcing their deep learning stuff. Part of me wonders if they do it because, as people get scared of AI, the federal govt can't come after lots of of small companies using the opensource AI to regulate/fine/shutdown. They could come after just Google or FB once people start loosing lots of jobs to AI, if they where the only kids on the playground.

Re: DeepText: Facebook's text understanding engine

#14
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…

Know those little emails that Facebook sends you throughout the day? I've turned most of mine off, but I still like to know when people mention me, or get a page update.

Well, I figured out today that when Facebook has these, it doesn't necessarily send them to you right away. Instead it waits until it looks like you've bailed off the site to do something else. Then you get an email notification -- drawing you back into Facebook.

Yep. Pretty tired of it. Thousands of really smart people using the latest in tech to try to play me like a musical instrument.

Re: DeepText: Facebook's text understanding engine

#15
post #7
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…

When all you have is a machine learning classifier, everything looks like a classification problem.

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.

Re: DeepText: Facebook's text understanding engine

#16
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…

Know those little emails that Facebook sends you throughout the day? I've turned most of mine off, but I still like to know when people mention me, or get a page update. Well, I figured out today that when Facebook has these, it doesn't necessarily send them to you right away. Instead it waits until it looks like you've bailed off the site to do something else. Then you get an email notification -- drawing you back i…

I don't use facebook, but couldn't that also be an optimization? Like don't send the user email notifications if they're already on the site where they can see the # of notifications?

Re: DeepText: Facebook's text understanding engine

#18
post #10
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recommendations, algorithmic timelines and so on are indeed a bit of a nuisance. Similarly, Google Now is annoying me a lot at the moment but I can't use my watch fully without turning it on.

I find Google Now to be far more useful than e.g. Facebook "recommendations", which are basically ads.

Same, but google now for me is basically a mash of:

1. The weather

2. Stocks that have the same acronyms as things I've searched for

3. Flight information for any flight with the same code as mine

4. A recommendation of a film I might like to see because I searched for actors in them (which might be good except the reason I was looking up those actors was that I had just watched that film)

5. Sports scores for teams I don't follow

6. Possibly updates to sites I visit regularly (equivalent to a highly unreliable RSS client)

Re: DeepText: Facebook's text understanding engine

#19
post #11

Are they going to open source it so that everyone else can use DeepText?

It seems like a lot of big companies are open sourcing their deep learning stuff. Part of me wonders if they do it because, as people get scared of AI, the federal govt can't come after lots of of small companies using the opensource AI to regulate/fine/shutdown. They could come after just Google or FB once people start loosing lots of jobs to AI, if they where the only kids on the playground.

They are mostly releasing their tools though. The raw diamonds are the trained network weights, it's architecture and the data itself. Releases on those parts we see rarely from private companies.

Re: DeepText: Facebook's text understanding engine

#20
It is useful to hear what architectures they are using (e.g., BRNNs) and I appreciate the pointer to the original paper.

I was hoping for some open source code to read, or more detail on their models. Facebook is pretty good at open sourcing things, so hopefully more papers will be released and open source software as it makes sense for FB to do that.

EDIT: typos

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