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Shirt Without Stripes

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Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#331
post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried to search for "cheese without holes" on Google and it yielded good results. I think the problem here is that the query is something people would rarely search.

If that's the case that's a big problem, because human children are trivially capable of both formulating and understanding uncommon sentences which still make sense. It might be hard to come up with examples on the spot, but in everyday life you will routinely come across things you need to refer to by negation which are relatively uncommon.

Human children are also capable of walking, but it’s one of the hardest problems in robotics. Things brains can do intuitively, they can do because they have millions of years of evolution behind them.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#333

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…

Google was good at launch because it was harvesting data from webrings and directories to provide it "high quality" link ranking data. However, they didn't thank or credit or share any of their revenue with the sites whose human curation helped their results become so impressive. Seeing that Google search was effective, most human curators stopped curating directories and webrings. The SEO industry picked up the slac…

I disagree with your first point but agree with your second. Google obsoleted most webrings/directories because page rank was a better way of calculating a websites popularity. Then, websites figured out how to game page rank, and its been a gradual decline ever since.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#334

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 think a huge Chinese room type parser with a bunch of heuristics bolted on probably provides much better bang for the buck than trying to implement actual NLP (in every possible language, or even just in English). So that's probably what nearly everybody is doing.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google was good at launch because it was harvesting data from webrings and directories to provide it "high quality" link ranking data. However, they didn't thank or credit or share any of their revenue with the sites whose human curation helped their results become so impressive. Seeing that Google search was effective, most human curators stopped curating directories and webrings. The SEO industry picked up the slac…

> Google has not yet discovered how to automate "is this a quality link?" Google has so much more data than just the keywords and searches people make, it seems like this should be a problem they could solve. Through tracking cookies (e.g. Google Analytics) they should be able to follow a single user's session from start to finish, and they also should be able to 'rank' users in some vague way where they'd learn whic…

Theoretically, they could do a lot of things, but plenty of those would get them in hot water from a regulatory standpoint.

Also, don't underestimate the adversaries. Ranking well on Google means earning a lot of money. So much so, that I'd argue the SEO-people are making significantly more money than Google loses by having spammy SERPs. They will happily throw money at the problem and work around the filters. I don't think you can really select for quality by statistical measures. Google tried and massively threw "trust" at traditional media companies and "brands". The SEO-people responded by simply paying the media companies to host their content, and now they rank top 3, pay less than they did by buying links previously, and never get penalties.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#336
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...

From that link:

"So that’s a lot of technical details, but what does it all mean for you? Well, by applying BERT models to both ranking and featured snippets in Search, we’re able to do a much better job helping you find useful information. In fact, when it comes to ranking results, BERT will help Search better understand one in 10 searches in the U.S. in English, and we’ll bring this to more languages and locales over time.

"Particularly for longer, more conversational queries, or searches where prepositions like “for” and “to” matter a lot to the meaning, Search will be able to understand the context of the words in your query. You can search in a way that feels natural for you.

...

"No matter what you’re looking for, or what language you speak, we hope you’re able to let go of some of your keyword-ese and search in a way that feels natural for you. But you’ll still stump Google from time to time. Even with BERT, we don’t always get it right. If you search for “what state is south of Nebraska,” BERT’s best guess is a community called “South Nebraska.” (If you've got a feeling it's not in Kansas, you're right.)

"Language understanding remains an ongoing challenge, and it keeps us motivated to continue to improve Search. We’re always getting better and working to find the meaning in-- and most helpful information for-- every query you send our way."

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#337
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...

Just because they've implemented something that helps in a certain area doesn't mean they'll always get it right.

I think you'd struggle to find anywhere Google claims to "understand everything", making your assertion a strawman.

Literally in the article you're quoting from Google:

> But you’ll still stump Google from time to time. Even with BERT, we don’t always get it right. If you search for “what state is south of Nebraska,” BERT’s best guess is a community called “South Nebraska.” (If you've got a feeling it's not in Kansas, you're right.)

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#338
post #13

The point of this isn't asking how to apply boolean search operators, it's showing that the largest AI-focused companies in the world absolutely suck at NLP.

It's not as simple as NLP. The shirts them selves have to labelled as having stripes or not. If striped is not a attribute of the shirt, it doesn't matter of the NLP can parse the meaning of striped.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#339
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…

This is pointless overcomplicating. I might agree if the example would be slightly more interesting, but "without stripes" isn't even "absence of ", it is essentially a colour/pattern and can be easily attributed to a range of things exactly the same way "green" can be. Google translate correctly associates much more dubious and abstract concepts than that, and does it with statistical methods, i.e. associating word combinations with a location in a vector space. The fact all major search engines fail to do it here is just shameful. Especially Amazon, where it is pretty much a primary search function.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AGI is some AI that isn't specialized in a single problem. There is nothing on the word "intelligence" to imply it's not specialized.

Right, because when I think of "intelligence" I assume it's specialized and otherwise is dumb as rocks. Naturally. Which is why marketers are really just advertising specialized tools, not agi. Obviously. I know what agi is; I just find the terms backward.

When you think of intelligence, you think of the human kind. As we create different things that have some of the properties we usually identify as "intelligence", but lack others that were completely correlated until that time, we need to create better words that can express the new situation.

It's perfectly ok to prefer the qualifier to go the other way around, keep intelligence general and change the name of the specialized form. But that's just not how our language evolved.

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