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Shirt Without Stripes

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Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#481

Post by indecisive_user »

tcgv wrote: post #463
albertzeyer wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess, even in the original results, the problem is not really that Google search was not understanding the meaning of the search term (which is possible with today's models). Rather, it was a bit confused about what you are really searching for here. Maybe a comparison of shirts with and without stripes? The search query was just unusual, and it is not too unreasonable to guess that the query was not meant literal…

> the problem is not really that Google search was not understanding the meaning of the search term (...) Rather, it was a bit confused about what you are really searching for here. Maybe a comparison of shirts with and without stripes? In this very specific case I don't buy it. Sure, it probably applies for other queries, but if you approach a salesperson and ask him for "shirts without stripes" it's pretty clear wh…

Agreed, it's not that weird of a search. Other, similar queries like "shirt without buttons/collar/pocket" seem to work just fine.

The only difference is that those are all physical properties of a shirt while stripes is a type of pattern.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#483

Post by karlicoss »

XCSme wrote: post #352
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…

I agree with search getting worse, now I always have to add quotes around my keywords: yes, I really wanted to search for this exact thing. I also end up adding "reddit" in my query just so I can reach some genuine useful questions/responses instead of top 10 blog posts written just for the Amazon affiliate links.

Same! Or hackernews search when applicable, and sometimes even twitter is fruitful.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#485

Post by c3534l »

If you select "I don't like this recommendation" for a video on youtube, you will get to provide feedback on why you did so: either "I don't like this video" or "I've already watched this video." I've pressed the latter on literally thousands of videos at this point, and after well over a year of this, YouTube still hasn't figured out that I don't want to be recommended videos that I've already watched.

Likewise, Google says I should log into their website for personalized search results, but after years of always clicking on Python 3 results over Python 2.7 results, it never learned to show me the correct result.

Eventually I realized that personalized recommendations are more or less just a thin cover for collecting vast amounts of data with no benefit to the consumer. I believe we have the technology to do better, but we don't use it. In fact, we seem to be using it less and less.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#486

Post by ChuckMcM »

I love this. It is such an easy to grasp example of what is "wrong" with search. Historically, searching was keyword based so documents with "shirt" and "stripes" would rank highly, even though none of those pages had the keyword "without".

As humans we know immediately that the search is for documents about shirts where stripes are not present. But the term 'without' doesn't make it through to the term compositor step which is feeding terms in a binary relationship. We might make such a relationship as

Q = "shirt" AND NOT "stripes"

You could onebox it (the Google term for a search short circuit path that recognizes the query pattern and some some specific action, for example calculations are a onebox) and then you get a box of shirts with no stripes and an bunch of query results with.

You can n-gram it, by ranking the without-stripes n-gram higher than the individual terms, but that doesn't help all that much because the English language documents don't call them "shirts without stripes", generally they are referred to as "plain shirts" or "solid shirts" (plain-shirt(s) and solid-shirt(s) respectively). But you might do okay punning without-stripes => plain or to solid.

From a query perspective you get better accuracy with the query "shirts -stripes". This algorithmic query uses unary minus to indicate a term that should not be on the document but it isn't very friendly to non-engineer searchers.

Finally you can build a punning database, which is often done with misspellings like "britney spears" (ok so I'm dating my tenure with that :-)) which takes construction terms like "without", "with", "except", "exactly" and creates an algorithmic query that is most like the original by simple substitution. This would map " without " => " -". The risk there is that "doctors without borders" might not return the organization on the first page (compare results from "doctors without borders" and "doctors -borders", ouch!)

When people get sucked into search it is this kind of problem that they spend a lot of time and debate on :-)

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#488

Post by diegoperini »

apocalypstyx wrote: post #187
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’m sorry, Monsieur, we are all out of cream — how about with no milk?”

In Zizek's words, white coffee without milk isn't black coffee.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#489

Post by melenaboija »

ScoutOrgo wrote: post #395
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…

The OP most likely isn't up to date on latest NN architectures which can learn from the ordering of words. Statistical methods ML, not anymore in NLP.

I guess it depends on what you mean with statistical methods but as you said "not anymore in NLP" then yes, statistical methods are in NLP. Both language models and transformers use statistics to predict.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#490

Post by lonelappde »

albertzeyer wrote: post #437
alberth wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The # 1 google result for “Shirt without stripes” is this very own HN post https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Shirt+without+Stripes%22&

I guess, even in the original results, the problem is not really that Google search was not understanding the meaning of the search term (which is possible with today's models). Rather, it was a bit confused about what you are really searching for here. Maybe a comparison of shirts with and without stripes? The search query was just unusual, and it is not too unreasonable to guess that the query was not meant literal…

This is way overthinking it. The search engines aren't semantically analyzing the images. They are just matching nearby text.
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