simple LTR w/ clickstream data would fix this easy
Shirt Without Stripes
511–520 of 639 posts
Re: Shirt Without Stripes
#512Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 que…
> I was about to say there are no such queries
There are very clearly many queries with no advertising revenue, because there are many queries that show no ads. Trying some searches off the top of my head that I expected wouldn't have ads, I don't get any ads on [cabbage], [who is the president], [3+5], or [why is the sky blue]. On the other hand, if I search for a highly commercial query like [mesothelioma] the first four results are ads.
> 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
My model of what happened is that SEO got a lot better. When Google first came out it was amazing because Page Rank was able to identify implicit ranking information in pages. Once it's valuable to have lots of backlinks, though, this gets heavily gamed. Staying ahead of efforts to game the algorithm is really hard, and I think a lot of times people's experience of a better search engine comes from a time when SEO was much less sophisticated.
> The most convincing in this is typing first name + last name queries in imagines and getting celebrities who only have the first or the last name.
This hasn't been my experience, so I tried an image search for [tom cruise], curious if I would get other Toms. The first 45 responses were all of the celebrity, and image 46 was of Glen Powell in https://helenair.com/people/tom-cruise-helps-glen-powell-lea... which is a different kind of mistake. Do you remember what query you were seeing this on?
Re: Shirt Without Stripes
#513Earlier 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!
And then there are those who are able to say things that [intentionally] have different meaning to different audience members.
Re: Shirt Without Stripes
#514The 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.
Google has for years put out puff pieces talking about high accuracy on image tagging. It’s only within the last few months that searching my Photos library for “cat” returned something other than pictures of my dog.
There’s a nuanced argument that practitioners know how ML is so dependent on training data and accuracy tails off sharply, but that nuance tends to removed from anything selling to potential customers — which has not been a great way to keep them in my experience.
Re: Shirt Without Stripes
#515This 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…
It seems like the attribution problem is an English problem. The query doesn't have to be English.
Re: Shirt Without Stripes
#516The 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.
At least this is relatively innocuous. Until recently if you did a Google Image Search for "person" or "people", it only showed white men.
The inverse: a favorite trope of the American far right is that GIS for "american family" will show you photos of... mixed race families. (Something the far right has strong opinions on, and is a tiny minority of all marriages in the US)
Something of a corollary to Brooksian egg-manning: with an infinite number of possible searches, you can find at least one whose results do not exactly match the current demographics of the state from which you place the search.
Re: Shirt Without Stripes
#517This 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…
It seems like the attribution problem is an English problem. The query doesn't have to be English. https://www.google.com/search?q=shirt+-"stripes"
It does, if you're running a search engine for a general audience. the `-` operator is useful, but it's almost an admission of defeat: what most users want is to be able to describe what they're looking for in reasonable english and get relevant results back. Having `-` for advanced users is useful, but it's not friendly to the majority of users.
Re: Shirt Without Stripes
#518A good demonstration of the linguistic fact that far from being meaningless, prepositions (adpositions, more generally) are actually highly consequential for meaning and are highly ambiguous between different meanings. Here's a paper that'll give you a good appreciation of this from an NLP perspective if you're curious: https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W16-1712.pdf
Re: Shirt Without Stripes
#519Earlier 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…
Another fun sentence is "I never said she stole my money". It has 7 different meanings depending on which word is stressed/emphasized. Was about to type it all but DDG'd this:
https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/64ae8h/i...
Re: Shirt Without Stripes
#520Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 que…
> I was about to say there are no such queries There are very clearly many queries with no advertising revenue, because there are many queries that show no ads. Trying some searches off the top of my head that I expected wouldn't have ads, I don't get any ads on [cabbage], [who is the president], [3+5], or [why is the sky blue]. On the other hand, if I search for a highly commercial query like [mesothelioma] the firs…
> This hasn't been my experience, so I tried an image search for [tom cruise]
I believe what he means is that searching for first name + last name of someone who isn’t a celebrity gets you celebrities who match either the first name or last name.
Searching for Tim Neeson gets you a wall of photos of Liam Neeson: https://www.google.com/search?q=tim+neeson&tbm=isch
Searching for Tim Cruise blankets you with pictures of Tom Cruise, but it at least says “Showing results for tom cruise“ so you know it did an autocorrect. When I tried other first names + Cruise, the effect is less pronounced than with the Neeson example. Maybe it’s because cruise is a more common name as well as an English word.