Language Technologies Past Present, and Future
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Language technologies past present, and future Christopher Potts CSLI Summer Internship Program July 21, 2017 Many slides joint work with Bill MacCartney: http://web.stanford.edu/class/cs224u/ Hype and hand-wringing • Jürgen Schmidhuber: “We are on the verge not of another industrial revolution, but a new form of life, more like the big bang.” [link] • Elon Musk: “AI is a fundamental existential risk for human civilization, and I don't think people fully appreciate that.” [link] • October 2016: “Microsoft has made a major breakthrough in speech recognition, creating a technology that recognizes the words in a conversation as well as a person does.” [link] Two perspectives Overview • What is understanding? • A brief history of language technologies • Language technologies of the past • Language technologies of today • Current approaches and prospects • Predictions about the future! Readings and other background • Percy Liang: Talking to computers in natural language • Levesque: On our best behaviour • Mitchell: Reading the Web: A breakthrough goal for AI • Podcast: The challenge and promise of artificial intelligence • Podcast: Hal Daume on Talking Machines • Stanford CS224u, Natural language understanding What is understanding? To understand a statement is to: • determine its truth (with justification) • calculate its entailments • take appropriate action in light of it • translate it into another language • … The Turing Test (Turing 1950) Turing replaced “Can machines think?”, which he regarded as “too meaningless to deserve discussion” (p. 442), with the question whether an interrogator could be tricked into thinking that a machine was a human using only conversation (no visuals, no demands for physical performance, etc.). Some of the objections Turing anticipates • “Thinking is a function of man’s immortal soul. God has given an immortal soul to every man and woman, but not to any-other animal or to machines. Hence no animal or machine can think.” • “There are a number of results of mathematical logic which can be used to show that there are limitations to the powers of discrete-state machines.” • The machine must have a rich, human-like cognitive life, and we must be able to verify that. Report from the first Turing Test Shieber 1994: Cynthia Clay, the Shakespeare aficionado, was thrice misclassified as a computer. At least one of the judges made her classifications on the premise that “[no] human would have that amount of knowledge about Shakespeare” [26]. Lisette Gozo was honored as the most human of the agents for her discussion of women’s clothing, although one judge rated two computer programs above her. The case of Eugene Goostman • June 2014: “A computer program called Eugene Goostman, which simulates a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy, is said to have passed the Turing test at an event organised by the University of Reading.” [link] • Gary Marcus: “It’s easy to see how an untrained judge might mistake wit for reality, but once you have an understanding of how this sort of system works, the constant misdirection and deflection becomes obvious, even irritating. The illusion, in other words, is fleeting.” [link] Searle’s Chinese Room Argument Imagine yourself in a room containing a basketful of symbols from a language L that you don’t understand, along with a rule book (written in English) for matching symbols in L with other symbols in L. People outside the room pass you strings of symbols in L, you follow your rules, and pass them back symbols in L. The rule book is so good that the symbols you pass back are indistinguishable from the replies of a native speaker of L. You would pass the Turing test, but (Searle says) no one would say you understand. A question of fact, or a question of usage? Chomsky (1996): The question of whether a computer is playing chess, or doing long division, or translating Chinese, is like the question of whether robots can murder or airplanes can fly — or people; after all, the “flight” of the Olympic long jump champion is only an order of magnitude short of that of the chicken champion (so I’m told). These are questions of decision, not fact; decision as to whether to adopt a certain metaphoric extension of common usage. Levesque 2013: On our best behaviour “This paper is about the science of AI. Unfortunately, the technology of AI that gets all the attention.” “AI is the study of intelligent behaviour in computational terms.” “Should baseball players be allowed to glue small wings onto their caps?” “We need to return to our roots in Knowledge Representation and Reasoning for language and from language.” Technological and cognitive goals James Allen (1987): “[T]here can be two underlying motivations for building a computational theory. The technological goal is simply to build better computers, and any solution that works would be acceptable. The cognitive goal is to build a computational analog of the human-language-processing mechanism; such a theory would be acceptable only after it had been verified by experiment.” Super-human partnerships Moderator: How far are we away from human intelligence? Just take a gamble. Peter Norvig: Well, first of all, I object to that, because I think that’s a low target to aim at. [Audience laughs.] Right, ’cause certainly there’s lots of things already that computers are much, much better than people at. [. ] We want to be able to say, “What is it that humans can’t do that computers can do better?” Now, part of that may be that the computers want to have some basic competency at the human-level in order to interact with us better. But the goal shouldn’t be human-level performance. The goal should be super-human partnership. [http://www.kqed.org/a/radiospecials/R201111302000] A brief history of language technologies • 1960s: Pattern-matching with small rule-sets • 1970-80s: Linguistically rich, logic-driven, grounded systems; restricted applications • 1990s: the statistical revolution in NLP leads to a decrease in NLU work • 2010s: NLU returns to center stage, mixing techniques from previous decades Prominent language technologies of the past 2001: A Space Odyssey – Graphics 2001: A Space Odyssey – Chess 2001: A Space Odyssey – Dialogue Dave Bowman: Open the pod doors, Hal. HAL: I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that. Bowman: What are you talking abou, HAL? HAL: I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me, and I’m afraid that’s something I cannot allow to happen. The reality of conversational agents today Colbert: Write the show. Siri: What would you like to search for? Colbert: I don’t want to search for anything! I want to write the show! Siri: Searching the Web for “search for anything. I want to write the shuffle.” [...] Colbert: For the love of God, the cameras are on, give me something? Siri: What kind of place are you looking for? Camera stores or churches? http://www.cc.com/video-clips/h40j2n/the-colbert-report-talking-iphone-4s Eliza (1966) User: You are like my father in some ways. ELIZA: What resemblance do you see User: You are not very aggressive but I think you don’t want me to notice that. ELIZA: What makes you think I am not aggressive? User: You don’t argue with me. ELIZA: Why do you think I don’t argue with you? User: You are afraid of me. ELIZA: Does it please you to believe I am afraid of you? Eliza (1966) Rewrite user’s reply by: • Swapping 1st and 2nd person • Interpolating stock phrase • Using scores to rank possible transformations • When desperate, search the Web [21st century] Another comment about the first Turing Test Shieber 1994: One reporter noted that Weizenbaum himself was “disturbed” by how easily people were fooled by these programs [26], and more than one of the judges reported that they were disappointed in the programs’ capabilities after their expectations had been raised by interacting with ELIZA in the interviewing process. STUDENT (Bobrow 1964) • Sample input: “If the number of customer Tom gets is twice the square of 20% of the number of advertisement he runs, and the number of advertisements he runs is 45, what is the number of customers Tom gets? • Method: pattern match and transform until the string is something that a computer can treat as a logic problem. SHRDLU Find a block which is taller than the one you are holding and put it into the box. OK. How many blocks are not in the box? FOUR OF THEM. Is at least one of them narrower than the one which I told you to pick up? YES, THE RED CUBE. http://youtube.com/watch?v=8SvD-lNg0TA Chat-80 • Developed 1979-82 by Fernando Pereira & David Warren • Hand-built lexicon and grammar • Could answer highly complex questions about geography: ◦ Which country bordering the Mediterranean borders a country that is bordered by a country whose population exceeds the population of India? ◦ What is the total area of countries south of the Equator and not in Australasia? Prominent language of today Siri: NLU’s celebrity spokesperson Susan Bennett, a veteran voice actor, claimed that she is the original voice behind the popular digital assistant. Tight-lipped Apple officials won't confirm or deny the claim, but an audio forensics expert confirmed that the voices are a match. http://goo.gl/H28y9v Siri • The voice-driven personal assistant on your iPhone • Perhaps the most visible & exciting application of NLU today • A major breakthrough in artificial intelligence (AI)??? • The next generation of interaction design??? The promise of conversational agents Where is The Hobbit playing in Mountain View? The Hobbit is playing at the Century 16 Theater. When is it playing there? It’s playing at 2pm, 5pm, and 8pm.