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Shirt Without Stripes

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Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#501

Post by peterwwillis »

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…

This doesn't seem like you need fancy linguistics ML to fix. You take 90s-era search engine tech and add a database of attributes about every kind of product there is, and take a guess at whether "without" is a search term, a search result modifier, or a filter for an attribute of a product. When you display the results, simply ask the user if that was right; if it wasn't, ask them if they preferred the other filter method. Use those responses as a corpus to train the algorithm.

I mean, context is key, right? You're on Amazon and your first search term is "shirts". Unless their is a band called "shirts without stripes", the user wants shirts. The rest of the query is probably some filter of that product. You know shirts sometimes have stripes. It's not a one-size-fits-all algorithm, but it's simple enough that the user should end up with the results they wanted.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#502

Post by Thorentis »

foolinaround wrote: post #237
Alex3917 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least this is relatively innocuous. Until recently if you did a Google Image Search for "person" or "people", it only showed white men.

What is your point? The google image search you did -- did not provide incorrect answers, unlike the OP's

Jokes on you. Not having diversity is now considered incorrect, even if it wasn't stated. AI needs to learn to keep up with the craving for relevance the rest of Silicon Valley has by ensuring all results comply with whatever equal opportunity mantra is now in vogue. The next time I search for "CSS color chart" I expect the preselected color to be black.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#503

Post by chx »

_bxg1 wrote: post #470
zerd wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The general problem is much harder than that. You need to understand double negatives, when do they invert the meaning and when do they underline it? "Ain't nobody got time for that" can be interpreted in different ways. And then you need to understand sarcasm. Then a later sentence can invert the meaning of an earlier one. E.g. "This is the best movie ever. Said no one". Using word-pairs as features is easy, but the…

It gets even harder than that: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winograd_Schema_Challenge For example: "The city councilmen refused the demonstrators a permit because they advocated violence." Which party is "they"? There is no lexical information that can possibly answer this question. It depends entirely on an actual understanding of what "city councilmen" and "demonstrators" (in the context of city councilmen and p…

It gets even worse: "The city councilmen refused the demonstrators a permit because they advocated peace." the meaning of this sentence in 1968 is different than in 2020!

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#504

Post by searchableguy »

belorn wrote: post #443
Alex3917 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least this is relatively innocuous. Until recently if you did a Google Image Search for "person" or "people", it only showed white men.

One can play this game a lot and most results will return expected cultural biased results. A "kind person" is apparently a white girl. A "good person", a white woman. A "bad person", white men. A "evil person", white men. A "honest person", equal mix of white women and white men. "Dishonest person", white men in suits. "Generous person", hands of white women. "Happy person", women of color. "Unhappy person", old whi…

Did you google all of them?

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#505

Post by animalCrax0rz »

chx wrote: post #503
_bxg1 wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It gets even harder than that: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winograd_Schema_Challenge For example: "The city councilmen refused the demonstrators a permit because they advocated violence." Which party is "they"? There is no lexical information that can possibly answer this question. It depends entirely on an actual understanding of what "city councilmen" and "demonstrators" (in the context of city councilmen and p…

It gets even worse: "The city councilmen refused the demonstrators a permit because they advocated peace." the meaning of this sentence in 1968 is different than in 2020!

Totally. The general problem is indeed difficult to solve, but I've seen lots of great work in this area.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#506

Post by pbhjpbhj »

jedberg wrote: post #457
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!).

Well it's hard to tell objectively but it seems to have got worse without me changing the privacy settings. I guess that's their quid pro quo though.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#507

Post by wyattpeak »

lonelappde wrote: post #490
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…

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

I agree the parent is overthinking it, but that's underthinking it. It's been a long time since search engines were mere text matchers.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#508

Post by 6510 »

jefftk wrote: post #492
nailer wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your ad hominem on the other poster is unnecessary, violates the HN guidelines and not an apt comparison. Pointing out the obvious: Google is an advertising company. If the cost of producing an accurate result outweighs the advertising income on a given term, there is no incentive for Google to produce better results.

This would predict that a query that has no advertising income will return no results, which is clearly not the case. Having a search engine that people go to whenever they want to search for things is incredibly valuable, because they will come to you when they want to buy things and you can sell ads. But unless you consistently give the best results for all queries, people will go whenever does. It's worth investin…

> This would predict that a query that has no advertising income will return no results, which is clearly not the case.

I was about to say there are no such queries but then I remembered having to type a captcha for seemingly automated queries. The captcha page has no results on it obviously. This is because automated queries do not produce advertising revenue. You have to buy them.

I've typed an insane number of queries since the beginning. A decade ago I use to be able to find truly exotic articles, I could find every obscure blog posting on every blog with 3 readers and I was pretty sure google delivered all of it. The tiny communities that came with the supper niche topics rarely produced a link I didn't already find. If they did it was new and I didn't google for a while.

Today google feels like it is a pre-ordered list from which it removes the least matching articles. Only if the match is truly shit will it be moved slightly down the page. The most convincing in this is typing first name + last name queries in imagines and getting celeberties who only have the first or the last name.

People wont go, it has to get much worse before they do.

edit:

With humans an pets a good slap over the head or a firm NO! will usually do the trick.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#510

Post by notriddle »

dredmorbius wrote: post #500
DenisM wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'd love to believe that myself. I absolutely hate ineffective & irrelevant search results. See Scott Adams, "Confusopoly" (2011): https://www.scottadamssays.com/2011/12/07/online-confusopoly... I've touched on this: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/243in1/privacy... The antipattern is sufficiently widely adopted that I've been. looking for possible dark-pattern justifications.

The original "confusopoly" link talked almost exclusively about pricing, and for good reason: pricing is based on numbers, which humans are bad at but computers are very good at, and every product in the catalog has a price, so it's easy to take the same tactic and apply it to all of the products.

I'm not sure trying to confuse people about whether a shirt has stripes on it would make as much sense. The purchaser seems likely to give up on picking an ideal shirt and just go with the cheapest result.

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