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

Introducing Google Cloud Natural Language API, Speech API and New Data Center

cloudplatform.googleblog.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 51 posts

Re: Introducing Google Cloud Natural Language API, Speech API and New Data Center

#31

Post by [deleted] »

dominotw wrote: post #26
dmorr wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Research PM here -- my team built the language understanding tech that powers the API. Thanks for checking it out! You picked a really interesting, and really hard, sentence to use to test us with. It has a couple of interesting phenomena: a reduced conjunction ("Line" goes with each color to make a name, like "Blue Line" even though "Blue" and "Line" are far apart), and high ambiguity ("Green" could be the co…

>"Green" could be the color, the environmental movement, the political party, one of several people, or lots of other things It says 'train line' right in that sentence. Where is the ambiguity? even if it missed that why didn't any of the 'cta' , 'chicago' , 'train', 'run' or 'line' nudge it in the right direction. It seems to have identified 'cta' entity correctly but completely ignored that context for the next wor…

[deleted]

Re: Introducing Google Cloud Natural Language API, Speech API and New Data Center

#32

Post by dominotw »

kafkaesq wrote: post #30
dominotw wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"Green" could be the color, the environmental movement, the political party, one of several people, or lots of other things It says 'train line' right in that sentence. Where is the ambiguity? even if it missed that why didn't any of the 'cta' , 'chicago' , 'train', 'run' or 'line' nudge it in the right direction. It seems to have identified 'cta' entity correctly but completely ignored that context for the next wor…

It says 'train line' right in that sentence. Where is the ambiguity? That's the thing -- in your (wetware) mind it says "train line." But the sentence itself it just says "line", which can mean a whole much of things.

But the sentence itself it just says "line", which can mean a whole much of things.

Ok i changed the sentence to include 'train lines'

CTA buses were moving, but slowly, and ‘L’ train lines were operating, but with delays. Blue, Brown, Orange, Green and Red Lines were running normally.

Even this is no good

CTA buses were moving, but slowly, and ‘L’ train lines were operating, but with delays. Green train line was operating normally.

didn't make any difference. Were you able to get it to parse correctly somehow?

Re: Introducing Google Cloud Natural Language API, Speech API and New Data Center

#33

Post by ganeshkrishnan »

melvinmt wrote: post #16

So about $1.44 per hour, that's reasonable-ish.

We run Apache OpenNLP which gives comparable results to this service. The advantage of Google Natural Language right now is the Wikipedia link it provides to the entities it detects but I haven't seen it's results beat Open NLP

Re: Introducing Google Cloud Natural Language API, Speech API and New Data Center

#34

Post by nostrademons »

kafkaesq wrote: post #30
dominotw wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"Green" could be the color, the environmental movement, the political party, one of several people, or lots of other things It says 'train line' right in that sentence. Where is the ambiguity? even if it missed that why didn't any of the 'cta' , 'chicago' , 'train', 'run' or 'line' nudge it in the right direction. It seems to have identified 'cta' entity correctly but completely ignored that context for the next wor…

It says 'train line' right in that sentence. Where is the ambiguity? That's the thing -- in your (wetware) mind it says "train line." But the sentence itself it just says "line", which can mean a whole much of things.

It does say "'L' trains" in the previous sentence and "trains" in the following sentence. And from bduerst's post, it appears that GCNLP does use non-local information to determine an interpretation. So in theory, there should be enough information within the paragraph to identify these.

The tricky part is that I don't really see a way that a computer could disambiguate between "train line" and "bus line" given the information in that paragraph; the only way that you could do this is to have knowledge of Chicago's transit system. (Indeed, as a human, I didn't know for sure that it was talking about a train line rather than some other mass transit system until Googling.)

Re: Introducing Google Cloud Natural Language API, Speech API and New Data Center

#35

Post by kafkaesq »

dominotw wrote: post #32
kafkaesq wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It says 'train line' right in that sentence. Where is the ambiguity? That's the thing -- in your (wetware) mind it says "train line." But the sentence itself it just says "line", which can mean a whole much of things.

But the sentence itself it just says "line", which can mean a whole much of things. Ok i changed the sentence to include 'train lines' CTA buses were moving, but slowly, and ‘L’ train lines were operating, but with delays. Blue, Brown, Orange, Green and Red Lines were running normally. Even this is no good CTA buses were moving, but slowly, and ‘L’ train lines were operating, but with delays. Green train line was ope…

Now we have a different problem -- in that the new examples aren't idiomatic. There's no reason we should expect it to identify the phrases 'L' train line and 'L' line with equal accuracy, because the former is something basically nobody says -- while the latter is something everyone (even someone unfamiliar with that particular city) understands.

But hey -- I'm not defending the API's accuracy ;)

Re: Introducing Google Cloud Natural Language API, Speech API and New Data Center

#36

Post by alyx »

jaytaylor wrote: post #21
euyyn wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how they compare.

AFAICT, the MS offering looks pretty basic by comparison [0]. No named entity recognition or sentiment analysis. [0] https://www.microsoft.com/cognitive-services/en-us/linguisti...

Through a combination of cognitive API sentiment analysis and entity recognition is also supported.

https://www.microsoft.com/cognitive-services/en-us/text-anal...

Re: Introducing Google Cloud Natural Language API, Speech API and New Data Center

#37

Post by dmorr »

dominotw wrote: post #26
dmorr wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Research PM here -- my team built the language understanding tech that powers the API. Thanks for checking it out! You picked a really interesting, and really hard, sentence to use to test us with. It has a couple of interesting phenomena: a reduced conjunction ("Line" goes with each color to make a name, like "Blue Line" even though "Blue" and "Line" are far apart), and high ambiguity ("Green" could be the co…

>"Green" could be the color, the environmental movement, the political party, one of several people, or lots of other things It says 'train line' right in that sentence. Where is the ambiguity? even if it missed that why didn't any of the 'cta' , 'chicago' , 'train', 'run' or 'line' nudge it in the right direction. It seems to have identified 'cta' entity correctly but completely ignored that context for the next wor…

Right, this isn't ambiguous to people. But you know that CTA and Green Line are related concepts. We don't yet have a way to model all of that huge amount of common sense knowledge that people have and use to figure out what a sentence means.

It's the curse of NLP, really. All the easy things are hard. (And the hard things are nigh impossible.)

Re: Introducing Google Cloud Natural Language API, Speech API and New Data Center

#38

Post by ammaristotle »

ljoshua wrote: post #7

On the other side of the NLP spectrum, what players out there are involved in NLG (natural language generation)? I've seen Arria and a couple other small projects, but I'm just starting to investigate the space and haven't found a whole lot yet.

Check out Wordsmith by automatedinsights.com - it does NLG for Yahoo! Fantasy Football, among other places.

Re: Introducing Google Cloud Natural Language API, Speech API and New Data Center

#39

Post by skoocda »

spdustin wrote: post #3

Regarding non-streaming transcription: It doesn't seem like the return includes timings, which would limit its usefulness in transcription for accessibility (where, for example, a post-processing step on our side would consume the Cloud Speech API and build SRT subtitle files for class recordings) Is there a product / service / library out there that could help align a known-good transcript with the original audio (c…

I'm currently developing a system along those lines. Not publicly available quite yet, but should be soon. Bug fixing at the moment.

Re: Introducing Google Cloud Natural Language API, Speech API and New Data Center

#40

Post by vegabook »

dmorr wrote: post #23
nostrademons wrote: post #19

Accuracy still seems to leave a fair bit to be desired. For example, when parsing "Blue, Brown, Orange, Green and Red Lines were running normally" from this news article [1], "Blue" was interpreted as the color [2], "Brown" was interpreted as the Brown Bears football team [3], "Orange" was interpreted as the Orange Line Washington (not Chicago) Metro [4], "Green" was interpreted as "environmentally friendly" [5], and…

Google Research PM here -- my team built the language understanding tech that powers the API. Thanks for checking it out! You picked a really interesting, and really hard, sentence to use to test us with. It has a couple of interesting phenomena: a reduced conjunction ("Line" goes with each color to make a name, like "Blue Line" even though "Blue" and "Line" are far apart), and high ambiguity ("Green" could be the co…

okay but "this is really hard" is not a good argument when ("beta" notwithstanding) this is being pitched pretty heavily by your firm with this public announcement. None of my professors or bosses have ever accepted "this is really hard" as a legitimate answer to the tasks I was given if I myself had pitched my ability to perform them. A firm like Google, with all its towering resources, is going to have a hard time getting cred with excuses.
Post reply on HN