Tethering the model to human intent is, indeed, a difficult problem. It won’t be solved, at least, not directly, through the NWITS model. In order to tether it to human intent, it must be tethered to language and its corresponding intent. How do you do that? Well, here’s a way:…
Overflowing
Abstraction via Repetition In a fastAI class, I asked the following: Do any language models attempt to provide meaning? For instance, “I’m going to the store” is the opposite of “I’m not going to the store.” Or “I barely understand this stuff” and “That ball came so close to my…
The Calculus of Everyday Life
Toward Experimental Techniques If I recognize a pattern, a machine should be able to as well, given enough training data. However, a machine might also recognize something other than what I am seeing. Therefore it is better to indicate to the machine what exactly I have in mind. This is…
Animal Magnetism
What Are We Pointing At? Some years ago, I wrote a play about a Viennese doctor in Paris in 1784 named Franz Anton Mesmer. (From him we get the word ‘mesmerize’). His most famous case was a young blind pianist named Maria Theresa Paradis. His patients grasped iron bars that protruded…
The Trouble With Linguistics
Language is beautiful. The study of language, linguistics, less so. Consider the following, from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Compositionality of stereotype: the stereotype associated with a complex expression E in a natural language is determined by (and only by) (i) E’s morphosyntactic structure and (ii) the stereotypes associated with…
The Usual Suspects
Writing, Reading, Looking, Convolving Imagine you’re on a train. You pass the graffitied backs of warehouses, front-loaders parked in a snowy lot, a red-brick-and-white-wood apartment building, an electric company grid station, and then trees, a lake, and snow-dusted hills in the distance. If you turn your head, you can turn…
Pattern Recognition
On Classes and Instances Are there any concepts that could be of use in suggesting how machine learning could understand and convey meaning? I think there are: repetition and generalization. In the words of the great Philosopher Charles Barkley, I may be wrong, but I doubt it. I think perception…
Artificial Thought (Hello, word)
I’m an alien. But I’ll write this as though I were a human being. This is a blog about the relationship between human thought and machine learning. Specifically, about identifying patterns in human thought that might then be able to be identified by a machine. The vehicle for doing this…
Repetition and Generalization
First Principles Are there any concepts that could be of use in suggesting how machine learning could understand and convey meaning? I think there are: repetition and generalization. I may be wrong about this. In the words of the great Philosopher Charles Barkley, I may be wrong, but I doubt…
On Recognition
The Mind of the Computer A Convolutional Neural Network learns to classify an image. What is the computer doing when it does this feat of ‘recognition’ ? Is it something we understand? Here is what we know. Digital images are submitted as inputs (grids of pixels, with RGB values, i.e., numbers). Then,…