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Researchers reach human parity in conversational speech recognition

blogs.microsoft.com

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Re: Researchers reach human parity in conversational speech recognition

#81

Post by abecedarius »

arstin wrote: post #72
tree_of_item wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's frustrating when technologies like image and speech recognition and robotics are conflated with AI. Are you kidding? Of course these things are examples of artificial intelligence. I don't understand why people keep moving the goalposts wrt "AI".

If you take the goalposts to have been set by Turing's 1950 "Computing Machinery and Intelligence", the only people moving them are researchers who want to trump up their own work or marketers who want to sell things. My own taste uses the word "AI" as you do in a permissive way to include simpler tasks (which in themselves are more elemental than useful) like identifying an object in an image and presenting a few st…

Turing wasn't trying there to articulate a single target for AI research, he was responding to the claim that artificial minds were not possible even in principle. His response was basically, try this, if in open-ended conversation you couldn't tell one from a human, would you really still say there's no mind there? As you say, that's a really high bar from where we are, then or now.

I'm sure Turing's own goals for AI were broader than eventually passing the Turing test. He worked on neural nets himself and would've considered progress in perception as partial progress in AI.

Re: Researchers reach human parity in conversational speech recognition

#82

Post by jcoffland »

ar15saveslives wrote: post #69
jcoffland wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ELIZA could be made to believe in God.

Bash script can be made to believe in god. )

Obviously a bash script should believe in God. All it has to do is look around itself at the complexity of it's world and conclude God must exist. I plan to shred any of my bash scripts that do not figure this out within their useful lifetimes. I will print out and file the ones that do. I've written a long text file which explains this in terms a bash script can understand and left it globally readable on my system.

Re: Researchers reach human parity in conversational speech recognition

#83

Post by ChrisClark »

joe_the_user wrote: post #59
Eridrus wrote: post #3

The actual paper has a section on error analysis that is particularly enlightening: https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.05256 On the CallHome dataset humans confuse words 4.1% of the time, but delete 6.5% of words, most commonly deleting the word "I". Their ASR system confuses 6.5% of words on this dataset, but only deletes 3.3% of words, so depending on how you view this their claim about being better than humans isn't defin…

I was recently at a bar where they showed a movie with incomprehensible subtitles (English to English). I assume this was because they skimped and bought automatic subtitling. I think one important aspect is while humans miss words, they often get the sentence meaning correct. When computers miss words, they tend to substitute words that sound similar. That's readable if you have time but not necessarily as a stream…

It might have also been a 'bootleg' DVD from China or downloaded a version from there. I've had quite a few where they had done a horrible job translating into Chinese for the subtitles already, and then did a literal machine translation back to English.

The character on the screen said "Hello", the English subtitle said "You good." Which would be the literal translation of nihao.

Re: Researchers reach human parity in conversational speech recognition

#84

Post by skoocda »

Animats wrote: post #19

Very nice. How long before something this good is available as open source? A tough test would be to hook this up to a police/fire scanner, or air traffic control radio.

The novel elements of this have already been released individually, particularly the lattice-free MMI training which can be run through Kaldi's nnet3 configuration.

Also, don't assume that a 0.4 % increase means drastically better real-world results. This dataset has been around longer than I have, so by this point Microsoft has just gotten really good at tuning.

Re: Researchers reach human parity in conversational speech recognition

#86

Post by Namrog84 »

avodonosov wrote: post #52
hashkb wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's on purpose... journalists learned to do it this way.

http://www.smbc-comics.com/comics/20090830.gif

Linking the image instead of the site shall more people to miss out on the red button extra comic frame. And the meta hover text(xkcd style)(which there usually is) .

http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=1623

Re: Researchers reach human parity in conversational speech recognition

#87

Post by dlubarov »

loup-vaillant wrote: post #57

Great. Now Microsoft has the means to store every Skype conversations indefinitely —it's only text, now. Seriously, great work, but just like facial recognition, this will cut both ways.

Compressed speech doesn't take much space anyway. Narrowband AMR uses around 7kbit/s (depending on the desired quality), or ~1 megabyte for a 20 minute call. The quality isn't great, but it's adequate for most purposes, including speech recognition with reasonable accuracy.

Re: Researchers reach human parity in conversational speech recognition

#88

Post by arstin »

abecedarius wrote: post #81
arstin wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you take the goalposts to have been set by Turing's 1950 "Computing Machinery and Intelligence", the only people moving them are researchers who want to trump up their own work or marketers who want to sell things. My own taste uses the word "AI" as you do in a permissive way to include simpler tasks (which in themselves are more elemental than useful) like identifying an object in an image and presenting a few st…

Turing wasn't trying there to articulate a single target for AI research, he was responding to the claim that artificial minds were not possible even in principle. His response was basically, try this, if in open-ended conversation you couldn't tell one from a human, would you really still say there's no mind there? As you say, that's a really high bar from where we are, then or now. I'm sure Turing's own goals for A…

Yep! The assertion that Turing was setting a "single target for AI research" in the way you're using the phrase was clearly not what he was doing or, I hope, what I said. My intent was the opposite: to draw attention the massive range of "targets for research" which are already implicit in the original Turing Test in order to note that saying "there's still lots more to do" is hardly "moving the goalpost".

Just to link up the way you put things with the way I chose to here, his argument for how an artificial mind is possible proposes a reasonable, minimal standard which different sides can agree to---a criterion of, "well if it can do that then sure it's a mind!". And the choice of a open and unbounded conversation as the standard was brilliant because of the massive range of subcompetencies which are required for actually executing it (including, obviously, perception). Which, of course, we gradually continue to plod through in AI research.

Re: Researchers reach human parity in conversational speech recognition

#89

Post by joemi »

PravlageTiem wrote: post #30
jcoffland wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ELIZA could be made to believe in God.

Being made to believe in a god isn't the same as believing in one. Silicon Valley thinks AI is not an epistemological problem, as if neurons can be perfectly simulated atomically and that all intelligence processes can be categorized as structured vs. unstructured. Very naive conclusions. Ironically, they BELIEVE if you simulate the axiomatic neuron perfectly, emergent properties of intelligence will mystically emerg…

> Abrahamic religion explored the alternative intelligence problem in great depth over two thousand years ago. It's a pity the results have been lost to Progressive axe grinding.

I'll take the bait: What in the world are you talking about?

Re: Researchers reach human parity in conversational speech recognition

#90

Post by mastazi »

Namrog84 wrote: post #86
avodonosov wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://www.smbc-comics.com/comics/20090830.gif

Linking the image instead of the site shall more people to miss out on the red button extra comic frame. And the meta hover text(xkcd style)(which there usually is) . http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=1623

Wait a second... I just realised I've been reading SMBC for years now and I've never noticed the red button! I'm mad at how much I must have missed out on but, at the same time, I'm glad you pointed that out!
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