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Shirt Without Stripes

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Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#301

Post by shanecleveland »

jjnoakes wrote: post #291
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.

They are different though - shirts with patterns (hawaiian, tie-dyed, etc) are "shirts without stripes" but they are not "solid-colored shirts".

Point being that the more narrowly-defined search does not require Google or Amazon to infer any meaning beyond what the object of the search is actually defined as.

A shirt lacking stripes would never be described or labeled as a "shirt without stripes."

In the absence of that actual description, you are asking google to assume what you mean.

I would just never expect that to work very well.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#302

Post by KorematsuFred »

DenisM wrote: post #197

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 fiel…

I am little surprised with this result. When I worked on similar products we constantly look at our query stream, sorted the high volume queries and manually intervened to present better results to our users.

I will not be surprised millions of dollars are being lost because of this substandard query result per year.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#303

Post by derekp7 »

oliveshell wrote: post #25
derekp7 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be really nice if the search engines would automatically apply the "-" when it sees the work "without".

I’m not so sure. What about a search query for “Doctors without Borders“ or “Men Without Hats“? Surely interpreting “without“ as the negative operator would ruin those searches.

What happens when someone asks you about one of those items? You consult your memory reserves, and you find that those are proper names of specific entities. So your brain returns those entities. Now there very well be a high school band called "Shirts without Stripes", you most likely would call up plain shirts or shirts with non-striped patterns. No reason that a search engine wouldn't follow the same rules (i.e., Google must have millions of entries for Doctors without Borders and Men without Hats).

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#304

Post by aero142 »

DenisM wrote: post #197

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 fiel…

If the problem is that it didn't know where to apply the without, then why does it show me results from only a single entity? I would prefer so see an interleaved set of results containing all ambiguous entities.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#305

Post by nikanj »

seiferteric wrote: post #137

I have noticed in the past few years google results have become noticeable worse for similar reasons. Google used to _surprise_ me with how good it was able to understand what I was really looking for even when I put in vague terms. I remember being shocked on several occasions when putting in half remembered sentences, lyrics, expressions from something I had heard years ago and it being the first! result. I almost…

Your search for "skiing Norway" mostly returns results for skiing in the French Alps, because those pages have much higher visit rates.

Google is a dumbass nowadays, and regularly ignores half your search terms to present you with absolutely irrelevant results, that have gotten lots of visits in the past.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#306

Post by Aardwolf »

DenisM wrote: post #197

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 fiel…

> but you don't know where it belongs

Yes, the English grammatical rules make it unambiguous where it belongs. This is solvable.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#307

Post by DenisM »

smoyer wrote: post #266
DenisM wrote: post #197

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 fiel…

While this is indeed an example of the attribution problem, I'd argue that this particular query will never be solved. I don't search for a "shirt without stripes", I search for a "solid shirt, or a " hawai'ian shirt". I'd be curious to see how many sentences with attribution problems actually have other structural issues. If I want to write clearly and without ambiguity, I rewrite sentences that have these problems.…

>If I want to write clearly and without ambiguity, I rewrite sentences that have these problems. Why wouldn't I do the same for search queries?

Ok, so imagine one online retailer follows your advice and expect the users to write clear and unambiguous queries, while another retailer puts extra effort into attribution.

Which one will make more money?

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#309

Post by atq2119 »

animalCrax0rz wrote: post #259
albertzeyer wrote: post #243

Why should it not be possible to solve this with statistical methods? The model just needs to be able to understand the important meaning of "no" in here, in the context of the whole sentence. I would guess that most modern NNs from the NLP area (Transformer or LSTM) would be able to correctly differentiate the meaning. The problem is, I think there is no fancy NN (yet) behind Google search, and the other web searche…

"there is no evidence of cancer" and "there is evidence of no cancer" are two different statements with different meaning, so it's more complex a task than just understanding the importance of "no" in a sentence. It's involves semantic analysis of the sentence. The paper I linked to below describes a technique they call "deep parsing." Check it out for more context.

This is true, but isn't really that relevant to the parent's point about statistical methods. Statistical methods (and "deep learning" is such a method) could certainly take the order of words in a sentence into account, for example.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#310

Post by mherdeg »

onurcel wrote: post #293
DenisM wrote: post #197

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 fiel…

The point of the OP is that they claim they understand everything. Example: https://www.blog.google/products/search/search-language-unde...

OK, but what if an Amazon algorithm has actually learned that people who search for "shirt without stripes" are more likely to buy more things if the first image they see is a picture of a striped shirt?
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