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Shirt Without Stripes

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Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#191

Post by throwlaplace »

aerovistae wrote: post #123

This comment would go from "unreadable" to "interesting" if you had phrased it as: "Vaguely similar to a joke from _the movie_ Ninotchka that _the Slovenian philosopher_ Zizek often uses...." Give people context. Don't assume people know what you know.

Man you couldn't be more condescending if you tried.

1. Capital letters indicate proper nouns so syntactically it's clear Ninotchka is the name of something and Zizek is someone's name.

2. You contributed this wholly worthless comment using a device that has access to more information than any other in the history of the world. Are you also one of those people that asks people define words for you instead of looking them up when chatting with that person?

Give people the benefit of the doubt. Don't assume ill-intentioned motives when there's no evidence for them.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#192

Post by lokedhs »

throw345hn wrote: post #52

Only slightly related but a couple of years back I got an alexa as a gift. When you open the alexa app, they had the option to add list of todos as a reminder. The first thing I did is to say something like - Alexa, add a reminder to get milk and eggs and paper. The app literally added a single item like this - milkANDeggsANDpaper. After that I facepalmed myself and turned it off.

Every once in a while I try the voice recognition by trying to speak normally to it. Normally, as is saying things like: "please set a reminder for five... umm... no I mean 6 o'clock".

Normal humans do this all the time, and if I can't do it speaking to it becomes incredibly frustrating to the point that I never want to do it again. I don't want to plan ahead what to say before I say it.

Granted, it's been a couple of years since I last tried so maybe they're better now.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#193

Post by shanecleveland »

elsamuko wrote: post #124
shanecleveland wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

because google does understand that no and without are interchangeable. But, understandably, it does not correlate "shirt without stripes" as being the same thing as "solid-colored shirts." Why, because no one advertises or describes a solid-colored shirt as a shirt without stripes and no one searches that way. It's an irrelevant point, in my opinion.

I was searching for a DisplayPort adapter for a Mac Mini and got MiniDisplayPort adapters for Mac :(

So the better search would be "DisplayPort adapter for a Mac."

As with including the word "stripes" in a search where you want to omit results with stripes, including the word "mini" is only causing unnecessary confusion. The adapter that works for a Mac Mini will also work for a Macbook, as an example.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#194

Post by sib »

exhilaration wrote: post #181
rgovostes wrote: post #23

The point that the author is making, in a very understated way, is that all three companies have PR websites that breathlessly describe their advanced AI capabilities, yet they cannot understand a very simple query that young children can.

I disagree, "shirt without stripes" is an unusual word choice, not one that our ML models would be optimized for. Try "solid color shirt" and you'll see how much better the results are - at least on Google.

"Shirt without stripes" may (or may not) be an unusual word choice to enter into a search engine, but it's definitely one that a child would understand.

Additionally, "shirt without stripes" is not the same as "solid color shirt"; as an example, take a look at:

https://www.google.com/search?q=tie+dye+shirt

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#195

Post by zacksinclair »

exhilaration wrote: post #181
rgovostes wrote: post #23

The point that the author is making, in a very understated way, is that all three companies have PR websites that breathlessly describe their advanced AI capabilities, yet they cannot understand a very simple query that young children can.

I disagree, "shirt without stripes" is an unusual word choice, not one that our ML models would be optimized for. Try "solid color shirt" and you'll see how much better the results are - at least on Google.

Every human understands that phrase and yet the AI doesn't. That's the gap that has to be fixed.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#196

Post by altfredd »

softwaredoug wrote: post #160

In search we know it’s easy to cherry pick queries and criticize any search engine. A search engine is optimizing for billions of queries. Most of which are on the long tail. The real question is “shirts without stripes” really a query people enter? Or representative of a real pattern in the data?

> A search engine is optimizing for billions of queries. Most of which are on the long tail.

Citation needed.

As far as my personal observations go, Google is NOT optimized for long tail at all. It is always trying to return most popular results from cache of most popular results. Once the cache is exhausted, Google starts to return completely irrelevant trash (anything after first two pages of search is pure spam and meaningless keyword soup).

If you try to look up some obscure keyword and find nothing, try again after couple of months. There is a very high likehood, that you will see dozens of "new" results — most of them being from several years old pages. Perhaps, the actual long-tail searches still happen somewhere in background, but you are not going to see their output right away — instead you need to wait until they get committed to the nearby cache.

Another alarming change, that happened relatively recently (4-5 years ago), is tendency to increase number of results at expense of match precision. A long time ago Google actually returned exact results when you quoted search phrase. Then they started to ignore quotes. Then they started to ignore some of search terms, if doing so results in greater number of results. Finally, Google gained horrifying ability to ignore MOST of search terms. OP's example probably has the same cause — Google's NLP knows the meaning of word "without". But Alphabet Inc. can't afford to hose all those websites, that use AdWords to sell you STRIPED SHIRTS. This would mean a loss of money! THE LOSS OF MONEY!!!

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#197

Post by DenisM »

This problem is known as "attribution" - you have a "no" or "without" in the sentence, but you don't know where it belongs. One could (and one does) argue that the problem cannot be solved with statistical methods (ML), especially not in any domain where accuracy is required, such as medical recored analysis: "no evidence of cancer" and "evidence of no cancer" are very different things.

Zooming out, the language field breaks into several subfields:

- A large group of Chomsky followers in academia are all about logical rules but very little in the way of algorithmic applicability, or even interest in such.

- A large and well-funded group of ML practitioners, with a lot of algorithmic applicability, but arguably very shallow model of the language fails in cases like attribution. Neural networks might yet show improvement, but apparently didn't in this case.

- A small and poorly funded group of "comp ling", attempting to create formalisms (e.g. HPSG) that are still machine-verifiable, and even generative. My girlfriends is doing PhD in this area, in particular dealing with modeling WH questions, so I get some glimpse into it; it's a pity the field is not seeing more interest (and funding).

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#198

Post by [deleted] »

exhilaration wrote: post #181
rgovostes wrote: post #23

The point that the author is making, in a very understated way, is that all three companies have PR websites that breathlessly describe their advanced AI capabilities, yet they cannot understand a very simple query that young children can.

I disagree, "shirt without stripes" is an unusual word choice, not one that our ML models would be optimized for. Try "solid color shirt" and you'll see how much better the results are - at least on Google.

[deleted]

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#199

Post by ForHackernews »

stuartaxelowen wrote: post #167
aerovistae wrote: post #123

This comment would go from "unreadable" to "interesting" if you had phrased it as: "Vaguely similar to a joke from _the movie_ Ninotchka that _the Slovenian philosopher_ Zizek often uses...." Give people context. Don't assume people know what you know.

This feels like a perfect example of how contextual natural language is!

Somebody someone will developer a hipster AI capable of deciphering lefty twitter.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#200

Post by LanguageGamer »

exhilaration wrote: post #181
rgovostes wrote: post #23

The point that the author is making, in a very understated way, is that all three companies have PR websites that breathlessly describe their advanced AI capabilities, yet they cannot understand a very simple query that young children can.

I disagree, "shirt without stripes" is an unusual word choice, not one that our ML models would be optimized for. Try "solid color shirt" and you'll see how much better the results are - at least on Google.

Yes, that exact sequence of words isn't particularly common. And yet a child, even if they have hey have never been exposed to it, has no problem understanding what it means.

Whereas all these services seem to be processing the input in such a superficial way that they give the searcher results that aren't just inaccurate but are the opposite of what was asked for.

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