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Shirt Without Stripes

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Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#451

Post by atq2119 »

animalCrax0rz wrote: post #314
atq2119 wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which part of "The paper I linked to below describes a technique they call "deep parsing." Check it out for more context." could you not parse? I mean if us humans have a difficulty parsing each other's statements, then why should machines do any better?

None. I was merely pointing out that your comment wasn't a response to albertzeyer's point about statistical methods. That is to say, maybe you didn't parse their comment properly ;)

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#452

Post by pbhjpbhj »

transreal wrote: post #220

Searching "men without pants" versus "men with pants" gives much better results. This is a case where, while it makes sense to say the sentence, it's not a common use of language, and at the end of the day, the search engine will find what's written down, it's not a natural language processor yet (despite any marketing). Shirt stores don't advertise "Shirts without stripes - 20% off", they describe them as "Solid shi…

Thankfully, "men without pants" shows me exclusively men wearing pants, underpants that is, as I'm in the UK.

Searching "pants" only shows me "trousers", that's a big fail for Google IMO, I'm accessing google.co.uk.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#453

Post by dpcan »

Yes, exclusive search is a huge problem.

You have to know to search for "solid colored shirt", but when you can't think of this variation of search, or maybe there isn't one, exclusion is your only option, and it's broken.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#454

Post by pbhjpbhj »

natefox wrote: post #168
davesque wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you mean, "Please don't imagine a pink elephant." Imagining a non-pink elephant seems pretty easy.

Along these lines, I once heard somewhere that people do not process the word 'dont'. As a coach, I've had to shift my vocabulary to focus on the 'do's rather than the 'dont's Eg: If you're doing a sport where leaning forward is bad, avoid telling yourself 'dont lean forward' as your mind only hears 'lean forward', therefore reinforcing the thing you're trying to avoid. Alternatively, tell yourself 'lean back' or 'st…

My karate sensei has a terrible habit of showing how not to do things more than he shows how to do them, drives me crazy.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#455

Post by ori_b »

Lammy wrote: post #231
6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect their job has gotten way harder. It's easy to forget that they aren't just passively indexing. The web is basically google's adversary, with every page trying to be top ranked regardless of whether it "should" be.

I think it's disingenuous to say "the web is basically google's adversary" when Google AdWords is the reason so many pages fight for top ranking.

If it wasn't AdWords, it'd be something else. People build websites because they want their content to be seen. That means competing for search result ranking.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#456

Post by Traster »

tines wrote: post #261
bartread wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I couldn't quite believe your comment when I read it so I did a Google image search for "person" and the results weren't a lot better than you'd suggested. Mostly white men, a few white women, a very few black women, a handful of Asians, and multiple instances of Terry Crews. The net result of that Google search, combined with the "Shirt Without Stripes" repo, leaves me even more unimpressed with the capabilities of…

I think the skewing of results lessening your impressed-ness is the wrong takeaway. If anything, the AI is a more perfect mirror of the society it learned from than you expected. Perhaps the right way to look at it is that we are capable of producing things that we don't understand, that are more sophisticated than we realize.

This is the problem though, all those companies are advertising fantastical results. They aren't saying "Hey! We spent billions of dollars so our algorithm could be as racist as your uncle Steve!". Oh and by the way, Steve is now right - because all the crimes he ever finds out about are by black people, because that's what Google has decided he wants to see. So it's no longer him seeking out ways of justifying his latent racist tendencies, no, he's outsourced that to Google.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#457

Post by jedberg »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #450
jedberg wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are, like DuckDuckGo. But the first complaint is usually "their results aren't as good as Google" and that's because Google in reality still gives better results because of their (lack of) privacy. People want better results but don't want to be tracked, and those things are in opposition to each other.

It took me something like 6 years, but I've gone over to DDG. Their results were poorer than Google's for me, so when I tried to switch I used to end up repeating and adding !g to every search. I don't think DDG got better, but Google results are bad enough that I think they're equal in quality now (for me). I don't login to Google, have tracking disabled, use uBlock and pihole; FF/Brave.

> I don't login to Google, have tracking disabled, use uBlock and pihole; FF/Brave.

I mean, that's probably why they are equivalent for you. You've chosen privacy over better results (which is a totally legit choice to make!).

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#458

Post by bscphil »

bradleybuda wrote: post #365
cscurmudgeon wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this just a version of "God works in mysterious ways" applied to AI? "The AI works in mysterious ways. Trust it."

It's the efficient markets hypothesis applied to AI. "If the AI could make more money by showing something else, it would be showing something else".

I don't think it violates the efficient markets hypothesis. I think that entails "if it was possible for someone to create an AI that would make more money by showing something else, the AI would be showing something else." Roughly, efficiency means that the most profitable solution will be the one that wins out, but "profitability" includes the costs of building such an advanced system, assuming that it's possible at all.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#459

Post by DenisM »

dredmorbius wrote: post #407
DenisM wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

Great question, but with potentially nonintuitive results. A sales gimmick furniture store would use in the past was to offer customers a free gallon on ice cream for visiting the store. The value was to the store offering the promotion, as shoppers would be drawn to the "free" gift, but on receiving the ice cream -- too much to eat directly. -- would then have to go home to put the dessert in the freezer. And have l…

That's a fascinating story, thank you.

Still I insist that business serving up more relevant search results for loosely phrased queries will make more money than the one relying on the user to formulate perfect queries.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#460

Post by jodrellblank »

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.…

Because there aren't two kinds of shirt, striped or solid coloured. You even acknowledge that by mentioning Hawai'ian shirts. You might want a small check shirt, a mostly plain shirt but not mind logos so not completely monocolour, a plaid shirt, a large check lumberjack style, spotted or dotted or diamond pattern, flowery pattern, you might not even know what the other available options are to search for them one by one - you just know that you don't want stripes.

There is no ambiguity in "not stripes", you can't invert it and write it in the positive form of what you want; the neatest way to describe the category of what you want to browse is "things which are not stripey".

Particular personal bugbear is car websites where you can filter in "petrol engine" or "diesel engine", but there is no support for negative filtering, so you can't choose "not LPG". In so many search-and-filter options you can't exclude your dealbreakers, and it's much more likely that I have a single dealbreaker which rejects a choice overriding all other considerations, than that I have a single dealmaker which makes a choice overriding all else.

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