26 ms·

DeepText: Facebook's text understanding engine

407 points by adwmayer 10y ago

iamdave 10y ago
Slightly contrarian, or maybe not-but is anyone else sort of fatigued with social media trying it's hardest to do it all for you? Algorithmic timelines telling me what happened while I was gone (trust me, twitter...I would have gotten to it eventually), prioritizing what shows up (trust me facebook, I do a very good job hiding content on my own), telling me what I ought to buy (trust me, Amazon if I wanted it-I'd either already buy it, or I'm buying it later when I have the disposable funds), and now arranging transportation when hinting at going out an about for me (trust me, facebook Messenger-I live seventeen steps away from a bus stop that carries me right into the heart of downtown-I'm good) I have no mistakes that these features are probably loved by some, maybe even most, but more and more-while I don't want to disconnect FULLY from social media (while I much love the laconic, brevity inherent design of twitter, the fact that the 140 character limit is going away has me sighing heavily), I do sometimes finding myself wishing I could opt out and take a bit more control over the content I'm ostensibly subscribing to. Has anyone else felt similarly, or could maybe phrase the phenomenon better than I have?
- shamino 10y ago
  You aren't alone - I don't take well to unsolicited advice, unless it's about avoiding traffic :)
  - lucb1e 10y ago
    More often than not, Google Maps (I assume you're referring to) does about as good a guesstimate as any human in the area would. I'm starting to feel like some good old brains would serve us well sometimes. Take Google Maps' traffic again, it can tell me the traffic now. It can tell me expected traffic tomorrow. But it doesn't understand that if I depart at 8am and I arrive at 10am, then at 9am that traffic jam is worse than when I departed. I'm better at planning this route myself this way. Kudos to the people who built the whole model (almost certainly using some sophisticated algorithms) that automatically detects traffic when there's enough data, probably correlating it with their map data and stuff, but this is an elementary feature apparently nobody there thought to implement. It's not all just training sets and enough CPU power, some human intelligence to provide it with the concept of time would be smart, too. Now this might seem like one silly example, but in many cases it's like this. People promote machine learning and neural nets and all sorts of automated training in situations where some research and an if statement or five would have worked as well. Another simple example: we had security monitoring class and one of the topic was machine learning. Let your intrusion detection system learn normal traffic patterns and alert on, say, traffic spikes on Sunday nights when there should be few if any people working. I feel like looking at traffic data and some if statements would be more useful, especially since you can then integrate it with holidays and events and whatnot. Indeed, one of the warnings in the course was that "during events this will go off as well". Yeah, that's why we shouldn't use it here in the first place. This just a hammer and screw issue.
    - nibs 10y ago
      The other thing that Google Maps could add, while we are talking about unsolicited advice and the human element of making traffic decisions, would be sports games. My commute at around 7PM is usually clear, unless there is a sports game, in which case it is a nightmare for a very specific period of time before the game. Further, a big team generates a sold old game which generates more traffic than a mid-week game against an out of division team. Would be fun to program although rather complex.
    - ma2rten 10y ago
      People promote machine learning and neural nets and all sorts of automated training in situations where some research and an if statement or five would have worked as well. As a Machine Learning Engineer / Data Scientist I would always evaluate my model against a baseline (in this case the if statements) and only put the model in production if it outperforms the baseline.
- gvurrdon 10y ago
  Recommendations, algorithmic timelines and so on are indeed a bit of a nuisance. Similarly, Google Now is annoying me a lot at the moment but I can't use my watch fully without turning it on.
  - goldenkey 10y ago
    Google Now kept creepily insisting I was on my way home and kept calculating directions day after day..Even after disabling this directions to home feature, it still killed my phones battery life, so as omnitious as everyone likes to say Google is, they still had to have my phone do the ML cycles. Bah! Keep it all on your server Google! protesters yell 'Take it off your servers Google!' heh.. :-)
    - umanwizard 10y ago
      How do you know the battery drain was caused by CPU usage, as opposed to something like network?
      - goldenkey 10y ago
        I had checked the statistics on the Play Framework service that it ran under. There was abnormally high CPU usage, high battery usage, and it was running all the time.
        rspeer 10y ago
        Lots of apps use the Play Framework, not just Google Now.
        goldenkey 10y ago
        I am aware. But consider that I literally disabled/enabled it with intent to discover if it was the problem. It was. Google Now is a huge drain. Googling it turns up thousands of other similar experiences unfortunately. [1] [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=%22google+now%22+cards+causing+huge+battery+cpu+drain https://www.google.com/search?q=%22google+now%22+cards+causi...
- tdkl 10y ago
  > is anyone else sort of fatigued with social media trying it's hardest to do it all for you Yes, because they're not doing it for us, but for themselves, investors and customers (advertisers) fueled by our data.
  - wmeredith 10y ago
    This is the real problem. Zuck and co are a lot of things. Words like benevolent, disinterested, and unbiased aren't on that list of things.
  - renaudg 10y ago
    Could Facebook be doing so well because this is actually a win-win situation for everyone involved ? That includes the people you mentioned yes, but also users who get to use a valuable tool for free. The whole "if it's free, you are the product" party line may resonate in HN circles, but you have to realize the public as a whole doesn't think it's a bad deal at all.
    - rpgmaker 10y ago
      If those features had a negative impact on their bottom line they would never offer them for free to everyone so yes, they're doing it for themselves and it just so happens that some people find them useful.
    - mbrock 10y ago
      People in the general public don't really have a clear idea about what Facebook, Google, and Amazon are doing. Still, most people I know are vaguely aware that there's something creepy going on. They aren't really comfortable with Facebook, Inc owning their digital social life, but they rely on it because of the obvious network effect. Try asking someone "hey, you know Facebook use a lot of state-of-the-art technology to algorithmically understand the meaning of everything you post and write, feeding this massive data set into their huge artificial intelligence program?" I don't think it's likely that many people will say "cool, that sounds like a great deal, because I love it when I get very specifically targetted ads."
- narrator 10y ago
  When all you have is a machine learning classifier, everything looks like a classification problem.
  - devindotcom 10y ago
    Heh yeah I wrote about this a while back - http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/27/facebooks-categorial-imperative/ http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/27/facebooks-categorial-impera... But you add human intelligence to this kind of thing and it starts getting creepily accurate much of the time if you're looking to promote certain behaviors, expose others, or what have you.
    - msie 10y ago
      On yesterday's episode of POI a character said that the Machine (an AI) has to contain a simulation of a person in order to understand what that person will do.
      - visarga 10y ago
        I think AlphaGo had a pretty good simulation of its human opponent, even though strategy and intuition are hard.
        cyphar 10y ago
        AlphaGo didn't simulate its opponent, it used the entire recorded history of Go games to extrapolate what is the best move to play in a particular situation (falling back to Monte-Carlo simulations of possible games after reducing the problem).
        astrange 10y ago
        Game AI uses minmax decisions, so it does simulate the opponent to pick _their_ best move, then it picks the move that removes their best options. That's why it's so unsportsmanlike when losing and why it doesn't go for points when winning. It doesn't have a specific profile of the opponent, though, instead it thinks they're another AlphaGo. That's an area they could work on.
- DanielBMarkham 10y ago
  Know those little emails that Facebook sends you throughout the day? I've turned most of mine off, but I still like to know when people mention me, or get a page update. Well, I figured out today that when Facebook has these, it doesn't necessarily send them to you right away. Instead it waits until it looks like you've bailed off the site to do something else. Then you get an email notification -- drawing you back into Facebook. Yep. Pretty tired of it. Thousands of really smart people using the latest in tech to try to play me like a musical instrument.
  - zastrowm 10y ago
    I don't use facebook, but couldn't that also be an optimization? Like don't send the user email notifications if they're already on the site where they can see the # of notifications?
    - DanielBMarkham 10y ago
      But that's not what they're doing. I'll get mentioned in a comment while I'm on the site. I'll click over and read the comment and reply to it. Then, once I'm away from the computer for 30-60 seconds or so (I'm sure they have a system training for this), I get the email notification -- even if the original back-and-forth occurred an hour ago. The timing of when I get the email has nothing at all to do with when the event occurred. It's completely dependent on my interaction with Facebook. Many times, it takes so long, I'm usually thinking "Wow! I wonder what else X had to say?" but I click over and it's the same damned thing I already interacted with.
      - renaudg 10y ago
        This sounds like a bug / coincidence. I've never got a later email about something that happened live while I was browsing the site, and was already notified about.
        DanielBMarkham 10y ago
        A couple of times is a coincidence. I stopped counting after seven. So you're saying that there's a bug. And the bug waits for me to stop using Facebook, then emails me things from Facebook. I find this quite difficult to believe. At the least, it's a very convenient bug.
- newjersey 10y ago
  >algorithmic timelines telling me what happened while I was gone (trust me, twitter...I would have gotten to it eventually), prioritizing what shows up (trust me facebook, I do a very good job hiding content on my own) Absolutely! At least give me an option (even if it is buried nineteen pages beneath about:config) to switch to a simplified reverse chronological stream. Until this happens, I've in followed everyone on Facebook. If you didn't send something specifically to me, then no I definitely didn't see it. (:
- amelius 10y ago
  What scares me about this is the "bubble" it creates, see [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble (even mentions Facebook's news-stream)
  - PavlovsCat 10y ago
    This is a slight tangent, but I don't even like the fact that what I see when I type something into Google may not be what others see. I think the inconvenience of having to type "order pizza in $city" rather than just "order pizza" is more than outweighed by not kind of destroying "consensus reality" as far as it pertains to search results, not to mention the potential for really creepy things down the line. It's not something that bothers me terribly by itself, it may not be important yet, I just don't like the precedent and idea of it. And Facebook just can't seem to remember that I never am interested in whatever it considers "top stories", but always, every time I log on, switch it to "most recent". Not that I know that I actually get all the most recent stuff, but on top of that Facebook is clearly telling me it would prefer me to see its own curation of it, even though I obviously have no interest in that. That this option doesn't stick seems like the intended behaviour, and I consider that yet another hostile aspect of it. So I'll assume whatever they're now doing instead of a UI that deserves the title, it will understand text just fine when it suits advertisers, and will be useless otherwise. Not a claim, but a guess.
    - thesimpsons1022 10y ago
      I read a paper on this recently in class and I think their findings were that most google results are the same other than geographically specific ones like you mentioned. For instance, if we both type "trump", most of the results will be the same unless there is a trump tower near you, in which case it'll direct you to it. Ordering of results however can change.
      - thesimpsons1022 10y ago
        http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/amislove/publications/Geolocation-IMC.pdf http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/amislove/publications/Geolocatio...
- morgante 10y ago
  > I have no mistakes that these features are probably loved by some, maybe even most, but more and more Count me in the camp that loves them. I don't want to spend hours a day keeping up with social activity. Facebook does a great job of giving me a quick summary of everything going on in my friends' lives by sorting through all the drivel algorithmically.
  - PavlovsCat 10y ago
    > Facebook does a great job of giving me a quick summary of everything going on in my friends' lives The only way you can actually know that is to compare the summary with the raw data. The only way to remain sure of it is to keep doing that.
    - morgante 10y ago
      The "raw data" in this case is my friends' lives. Based on my (off-Facebook) interactions with them I remain confident that Facebook does a good job of keeping me up to date on their lives when I use it.
      - jheriko 10y ago
        i can tell you first hand that it does an awful job with my collection of facebook friends. it doesn't prioritise the people i care about most or even the things nearest to me... and more than once has absolutely polluted my feed with someone to the point i considered phoning them to explain why i was about to unfriend them. i'm not saying your experience is untrue... just that facebook haven't done a great job of this for everyone at all.
  - sgnelson 10y ago
    "...summary of everything going on in my friends' lives by sorting through all the drivel algorithmically." Sounds like you really care a lot [0]. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1g9PFtSCKw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1g9PFtSCKw
  - danieldk 10y ago
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- omarforgotpwd 10y ago
  Nobody wants these features, but Facebook doesn't make them for the users. They make them for the advertisers / suppliers to increase sales.
- dennyabraham 10y ago
  I wonder how well these decision systems stack against random suggestions? I notice it feels like I fixate on the few people or subjects that are regularly presented to me to the exclusion of everyone else.
- dclowd9901 10y ago
  You also risk exposing yourself merely to an echo chamber as everything is automatically self reinforcing. This is bad stuff -- socially manipulative dark patterns.
  - tomc1985 10y ago
    This is almost exactly what it feels like FB and much of the web (even some of HN!) has become/is becoming.
- wcummings 10y ago
  Yup, this is what will cause me to abandon twitter.
- vintermann 10y ago
  Well, do you filter your own spam too? The problem to me comes only when the big corporate AI systems no longer are fully on your side, like spam filters which let the "right" spam through.
crypto5 10y ago
Looks like just text classifier, which classifies text snippets by predefined simple intent.
- chlestakoff 10y ago
  Indeed.
derEitel 10y ago
I would be interested to learn more about their research behind it. Will there be any papers released? Specifically: how much data did they train on? How many machines for how long? How did the different NN architectures perform? I guess those things would be fine to share without revealing the inner workings.
- visarga 10y ago
  Such results as they published today have become pretty standard in the academic papers. I was wondering why weren't there any cutting edge applications of deep learning in text, as a product. It's probably too expensive to run the necessary hardware to use the latest and greatest ideas.
EGreg 10y ago
Are they going to open source it so that everyone else can use DeepText?
- _audakel 10y ago
  It seems like a lot of big companies are open sourcing their deep learning stuff. Part of me wonders if they do it because, as people get scared of AI, the federal govt can't come after lots of of small companies using the opensource AI to regulate/fine/shutdown. They could come after just Google or FB once people start loosing lots of jobs to AI, if they where the only kids on the playground.
  - derEitel 10y ago
    They are mostly releasing their tools though. The raw diamonds are the trained network weights, it's architecture and the data itself. Releases on those parts we see rarely from private companies.
- mark_l_watson 10y ago
  It is good publicity and good will to release open source code. They still have their business advantage intact: they have the data and the awesome infrastructure.
wslh 10y ago
Yesterday I mentioned vodka to my wife in Facebook Messenger and a few minutes later she saw a vodka advertisement on her timeline. Obviously Messenger will never include end to end encryption.
- mandeepj 10y ago
  are you serious? They had to decrypt text so that your wife can read it and that is where they started displaying vodka ads. edit - I meant to say even if they had end-to-end encryption then your text would still need to be decrypted so that other user can read it.
  - wslh 10y ago
    Facebook Messenger doesn't have end-to-end encryption, it is stored in Facebook.
    - anfedorov 10y ago
      Not just stored: http://www.cnet.com/news/facebook-scans-chats-and-posts-for-criminal-activity/ http://www.cnet.com/news/facebook-scans-chats-and-posts-for-...
  - guelo 10y ago
    End-to-end encryption means the server doesn't know the content of the message. Only the clients, the end-points, have the decryption key.
    - lucb1e 10y ago
      And then the endpoints integrate with ad networks after they've distilled it into topics. I mean, my message contents are personal data. The topics "buy a bike" and "sell a bike" are not (I mean, not by themselves), so those you can transmit to ad companies. Now of course you need to make the detection lightweight enough that you don't need to talk to the server anymore, but that's just a matter of time. The person you're responding to, who's got downvoted, has a point (if this was his point). Edit: I sounded like I agreed with it, which is not the case. Even if it's stored "private and securely" at Facebook, they would still be able to connect my topics of interest with my identity and contacts, which would "technically" comply with the concept of end to end encryption (only metadata leaks because topics alone are metadata, which always happens because you need to route messages)... but which still doesn't comply with my own definition of proper privacy.
Guildpact 10y ago
I wonder if this is in response to Google's open sourcing of Parsey McParseface: http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2016/05/announcing-syntaxnet-worlds-most.html http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2016/05/announcing-syntax...
- buskila 10y ago
  Or Microsoft's language parser: https://www.microsoft.com/cognitive-services/en-us/language-understanding-intelligent-service-luis https://www.microsoft.com/cognitive-services/en-us/language-...
  - deet 10y ago
    Facebook already has Wit.ai which is extremely similar to Microsoft's LUIS, and in some ways more advanced.
- tdaltonc 10y ago
  except this isn't open source.
- deet 10y ago
  If this post is a response to anything, it is most similar to Google's recently announced Allo, at least from a product perspective. It's a little tough to figure out what Facebook's goal with the post was though since it's not very technical.
mark_l_watson 10y ago
It is useful to hear what architectures they are using (e.g., BRNNs) and I appreciate the pointer to the original paper. I was hoping for some open source code to read, or more detail on their models. Facebook is pretty good at open sourcing things, so hopefully more papers will be released and open source software as it makes sense for FB to do that. EDIT: typos
samwestdev 10y ago
Everything is deep nowadays. Somebody should do a parody product called DeepBalls
- WiseWeasel 10y ago
  Makes me wonder what the next AI industry buzzword will be. After Big and Deep, maybe comes Fine or Narrow, Tactful, and finally Aware.
lucb1e 10y ago
My Facebook account was only for public posts and private messages only, to force myself not to post anything that Facebook might consider public as if it were private. This just made me give up on the company altogether. Fun that you guys can train a neural net to deduce what I like better than me, but as they said at the CCC conference, everyone has to decide for themselves how close they are with their machines (though that was in the context of taking your laptop to the toilet, in context of leaving it alone unattended).
johansch 10y ago
I kind of think Google will win over Facebook in this particular war, based on what I have seen so far.
gmantom 10y ago
So I mean this is great but are they open sourcing it? Is there a way for us to play with it? Or are they just bragging?
bvladimir 10y ago
need a hacker? contact whitewiz007@programmer.net they can help change your grades, access email accounts, social networks, clear credits card debts, credit your credit cards, increase credit score and access phones.
ilyaeck 10y ago
Are they actually open-sourcing it? There doesn't seem to be link to the code in sight.
Xeoncross 10y ago
Is this the paper they said they based this on: "Text Understanding from Scratch": http://arxiv.org/abs/1502.01710 http://arxiv.org/abs/1502.01710 Here is example code for text classification from character-level using convolutional networks in Torch 7 https://github.com/zhangxiangxiao/Crepe https://github.com/zhangxiangxiao/Crepe
return0 10y ago
I think FB has a strategy here that plays along well with their messenger (and their emphasis on bots). Imagine the example they give "I would like to sell my old bike for $200, anyone interested?", being matched with another user who said "I am looking for a cheap bike nearby". This plays right into google's territory, with the ability to organize and match people's intentions.
pookieinc 10y ago
Ya know, I normally don't believe in these "Facebook is listening into your conversations"-type voices and opinions because it seems like such an invasion of privacy and the company wouldn't do something like _that_ without permission. However, after a recent episode where I _know_ Facebook was listening to my conversation[1], I'm now much more nervous based on this machine learning news. I've become highly critical and pessimistic when Facebook says things like "Better understanding people's interests" and "New deep neural network architectures", not so much because of what their intent with the data is, but how they receive that data. It's done so sneakily, this is what I disagree with. I normally don't have a problem with Google reading my emails and suggesting news topics on Google Now + my flights, etc., because they ask if they can, but with Facebook, there's an era of creepiness that they are always listening. [1]: This past weekend, a close friend was telling me about his friend who works at Google and the following morning, this Google person came up on my "Friends suggestions". It was the most bizarre thing... I also confirmed with my friend if he looked this Google guy up later on Facebook, which may have prompted his Google friend to show up on mine, and he said he didn't touch Facebook after our conversation. EDIT: For further clarity.
- cyphar 10y ago
  Why did you think Facebook wouldn't do that? In their view, any content you provide to their site becomes their property. Why wouldn't that include conversations. Considering the fact that everything is unencrypted once it reaches Facebook, it's a mistake to assume good faith on the part of a company that makes its living trying to make you spend more of your life on their website.
  - pookieinc 10y ago
    Any content I provide to their site becomes their property is something I understand. However using my mic without specifically asking permission is something else. Yes, I do have their app, but even then, their app on my iPhone does not make my iPhone their property. In all honesty, I actually thought that this was something that phones would prohibit (I use an iPhone), but I was definitely mistaken and surprised by it. Having said all this, it was actually in the news[1] yesterday that Facebook will soon be providing end to end encryption, though I doubt it'll apply to the listening in on people's conversations chatting. [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/31/facebook-messenger-bot-encryption-secure-messaging https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/31/facebook-...
etiam 10y ago
Now we're really well on the way into DeepSh*t. When these things get just a little bit better, the Five Eyes agencies will suddenly not have a staffing problem any more.
nl 10y ago
Well that's a pretty disappointing post: "Hey, we use our deep learning tools on text. Look at this 12 month old paper". Everyone in the field has read that paper. It was good work! But there are lots of intriguing things mentioned in the post which deserve further details. The most interesting thing to me is "more than 20 languages"!! That's pretty nice - the paper had some early results for Chinese, but if it can perform similarly to the English results across 19 other languages that is probably the state-of-the-art for many of them.
uptownfunk 10y ago
Would love to see a compare / contrast between FB/GOOG/MSFT's offerings in this space.
cromwellian 10y ago
Isn't "text understanding engine" a poor description of what is basically a classifier? I'd expect a text understanding engine to do more than classify, I'd expect it to read a bunch of sentences in context and then be able to answer questions about it: John was walking down the stairs. John tripped and fell. John lays on the floor. Describe John's status: Is he hurt or in pain? Is he standing?
- aab0 10y ago
  Deep learning can do question-answering.
- nl 10y ago
  Facebook have one of the leading teams on doing Deep Learning question answering. Jason Weston et. al wrote a paper introducing a machine-generated textual dataset[1] similar to what you describe, eg: Daniel picked up the football. Daniel drops the football. Daniel got the milk. Daniel took the apple. How many objects is Daniel holding? There have been plenty other papers published by them and others tackling that and similar but harder problems eg[2] [1]http://arxiv.org/pdf/1502.05698v10.pdf http://arxiv.org/pdf/1502.05698v10.pdf [2] http://arxiv.org/abs/1511.02301 http://arxiv.org/abs/1511.02301
  - pimlottc 10y ago
    Can't Daniel just type "inventory"?
tmpanon1234act 10y ago
I know that tech company M.O. is creeping invasiveness by acclimating users to marginally more Orwellian incursions of their privacy over time, but are we already at the point where something like this can gain widespread acceptance? Seems like the willingness of the general populace to prostrate itself to our newfangled corporate overlords is only accelerating.
atrudeau 10y ago
And here I was hoping to see links to published papers or God forbid the release of datasets for fellow researchers... Heck, even a trained model would be nice. Seems like a PR stunt to attract talent.
justsaysmthng 10y ago
> Understanding the various ways text is used on Facebook can help us improve people's experiences with our products You mean show us more "relevant" ads ? Last time I checked, Facebook's *product" was advertising. Thanks, this is exactly what I miss in my life - more ads for products and services I don't need. So excited that Facebook is going to understand everything I'm talking about privately with my "friends" and sell my identity to more ad buyers, who'll design more subliminal ads to squeeze the last millisecond of what's left of my attention span.
themgt 10y ago
Perhaps we're all computer simulations whose purpose is to a/b test marketing on real-world people based on their social media posts.
greenimpala 10y ago
More creepy idealism from the team at Facebook.
hellofunk 10y ago
I feel like the more AI gets into the middle of our online interactions, then the more AI will try to steer those interactions. There is already plenty of evidence that our online behaviour is strongly influenced by algorithms, and I suspect this is just the beginning. One reason why I log onto FB maybe once every couple months; it just feels like I'm being manipulated.
- mbrock 10y ago
  Eben Moglen: > Facebook is strip-mining human society. Watching everyone share everything in their social lives and instrumenting the web to surveil everything they read outside the system is inherently unethical. > But we need no more from Facebook than truth in labelling. We need no rules, no punishments, no guidelines. We need nothing but the truth. Facebook should lean in and tell its users what it does. > It should say: "We watch you every minute that you're here. We watch every detail of what you do. We have wired the web with 'like' buttons that inform on your reading automatically." > To every parent Facebook should say: "Your children spend hours every day with us. We spy upon them much more efficiently than you will ever be able to. And we won't tell you what we know about them." > Only that, just the truth. That will be enough. But the crowd that runs Facebook, that small bunch of rich and powerful people, will never lean in close enough to tell you the truth.
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407 points by adwmayer 10y ago

Slightly contrarian, or maybe not-but is anyone else sort of fatigued with social media trying it's hardest to do it all for you? Algorithmic timelines telling me what happened while I was gone (trust me, twitter...I would have gotten to it eventually), prioritizing what shows up (trust me facebook, I do a very good job hiding content on my own), telling me what I ought to buy (trust me, Amazon if I wanted it-I'd either already buy it, or I'm buying it later when I have the disposable funds), and now arranging transportation when hinting at going out an about for me (trust me, facebook Messenger-I live seventeen steps away from a bus stop that carries me right into the heart of downtown-I'm good) I have no mistakes that these features are probably loved by some, maybe even most, but more and more-while I don't want to disconnect FULLY from social media (while I much love the laconic, brevity inherent design of twitter, the fact that the 140 character limit is going away has me sighing heavily), I do sometimes finding myself wishing I could opt out and take a bit more control over the content I'm ostensibly subscribing to. Has anyone else felt similarly, or could maybe phrase the phenomenon better than I have?

shamino 10y ago
You aren't alone - I don't take well to unsolicited advice, unless it's about avoiding traffic :)
- lucb1e 10y ago
  More often than not, Google Maps (I assume you're referring to) does about as good a guesstimate as any human in the area would. I'm starting to feel like some good old brains would serve us well sometimes. Take Google Maps' traffic again, it can tell me the traffic now. It can tell me expected traffic tomorrow. But it doesn't understand that if I depart at 8am and I arrive at 10am, then at 9am that traffic jam is worse than when I departed. I'm better at planning this route myself this way. Kudos to the people who built the whole model (almost certainly using some sophisticated algorithms) that automatically detects traffic when there's enough data, probably correlating it with their map data and stuff, but this is an elementary feature apparently nobody there thought to implement. It's not all just training sets and enough CPU power, some human intelligence to provide it with the concept of time would be smart, too. Now this might seem like one silly example, but in many cases it's like this. People promote machine learning and neural nets and all sorts of automated training in situations where some research and an if statement or five would have worked as well. Another simple example: we had security monitoring class and one of the topic was machine learning. Let your intrusion detection system learn normal traffic patterns and alert on, say, traffic spikes on Sunday nights when there should be few if any people working. I feel like looking at traffic data and some if statements would be more useful, especially since you can then integrate it with holidays and events and whatnot. Indeed, one of the warnings in the course was that "during events this will go off as well". Yeah, that's why we shouldn't use it here in the first place. This just a hammer and screw issue.
  - nibs 10y ago
    The other thing that Google Maps could add, while we are talking about unsolicited advice and the human element of making traffic decisions, would be sports games. My commute at around 7PM is usually clear, unless there is a sports game, in which case it is a nightmare for a very specific period of time before the game. Further, a big team generates a sold old game which generates more traffic than a mid-week game against an out of division team. Would be fun to program although rather complex.
  - ma2rten 10y ago
    People promote machine learning and neural nets and all sorts of automated training in situations where some research and an if statement or five would have worked as well. As a Machine Learning Engineer / Data Scientist I would always evaluate my model against a baseline (in this case the if statements) and only put the model in production if it outperforms the baseline.
gvurrdon 10y ago
Recommendations, algorithmic timelines and so on are indeed a bit of a nuisance. Similarly, Google Now is annoying me a lot at the moment but I can't use my watch fully without turning it on.
- goldenkey 10y ago
  Google Now kept creepily insisting I was on my way home and kept calculating directions day after day..Even after disabling this directions to home feature, it still killed my phones battery life, so as omnitious as everyone likes to say Google is, they still had to have my phone do the ML cycles. Bah! Keep it all on your server Google! protesters yell 'Take it off your servers Google!' heh.. :-)
  - umanwizard 10y ago
    How do you know the battery drain was caused by CPU usage, as opposed to something like network?
    - goldenkey 10y ago
      I had checked the statistics on the Play Framework service that it ran under. There was abnormally high CPU usage, high battery usage, and it was running all the time.
      - rspeer 10y ago
        Lots of apps use the Play Framework, not just Google Now.
        goldenkey 10y ago
        I am aware. But consider that I literally disabled/enabled it with intent to discover if it was the problem. It was. Google Now is a huge drain. Googling it turns up thousands of other similar experiences unfortunately. [1] [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=%22google+now%22+cards+causing+huge+battery+cpu+drain https://www.google.com/search?q=%22google+now%22+cards+causi...
tdkl 10y ago
> is anyone else sort of fatigued with social media trying it's hardest to do it all for you Yes, because they're not doing it for us, but for themselves, investors and customers (advertisers) fueled by our data.
- wmeredith 10y ago
  This is the real problem. Zuck and co are a lot of things. Words like benevolent, disinterested, and unbiased aren't on that list of things.
- renaudg 10y ago
  Could Facebook be doing so well because this is actually a win-win situation for everyone involved ? That includes the people you mentioned yes, but also users who get to use a valuable tool for free. The whole "if it's free, you are the product" party line may resonate in HN circles, but you have to realize the public as a whole doesn't think it's a bad deal at all.
  - rpgmaker 10y ago
    If those features had a negative impact on their bottom line they would never offer them for free to everyone so yes, they're doing it for themselves and it just so happens that some people find them useful.
  - mbrock 10y ago
    People in the general public don't really have a clear idea about what Facebook, Google, and Amazon are doing. Still, most people I know are vaguely aware that there's something creepy going on. They aren't really comfortable with Facebook, Inc owning their digital social life, but they rely on it because of the obvious network effect. Try asking someone "hey, you know Facebook use a lot of state-of-the-art technology to algorithmically understand the meaning of everything you post and write, feeding this massive data set into their huge artificial intelligence program?" I don't think it's likely that many people will say "cool, that sounds like a great deal, because I love it when I get very specifically targetted ads."
narrator 10y ago
When all you have is a machine learning classifier, everything looks like a classification problem.
- devindotcom 10y ago
  Heh yeah I wrote about this a while back - http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/27/facebooks-categorial-imperative/ http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/27/facebooks-categorial-impera... But you add human intelligence to this kind of thing and it starts getting creepily accurate much of the time if you're looking to promote certain behaviors, expose others, or what have you.
  - msie 10y ago
    On yesterday's episode of POI a character said that the Machine (an AI) has to contain a simulation of a person in order to understand what that person will do.
    - visarga 10y ago
      I think AlphaGo had a pretty good simulation of its human opponent, even though strategy and intuition are hard.
      - cyphar 10y ago
        AlphaGo didn't simulate its opponent, it used the entire recorded history of Go games to extrapolate what is the best move to play in a particular situation (falling back to Monte-Carlo simulations of possible games after reducing the problem).
        astrange 10y ago
        Game AI uses minmax decisions, so it does simulate the opponent to pick _their_ best move, then it picks the move that removes their best options. That's why it's so unsportsmanlike when losing and why it doesn't go for points when winning. It doesn't have a specific profile of the opponent, though, instead it thinks they're another AlphaGo. That's an area they could work on.
DanielBMarkham 10y ago
Know those little emails that Facebook sends you throughout the day? I've turned most of mine off, but I still like to know when people mention me, or get a page update. Well, I figured out today that when Facebook has these, it doesn't necessarily send them to you right away. Instead it waits until it looks like you've bailed off the site to do something else. Then you get an email notification -- drawing you back into Facebook. Yep. Pretty tired of it. Thousands of really smart people using the latest in tech to try to play me like a musical instrument.
- zastrowm 10y ago
  I don't use facebook, but couldn't that also be an optimization? Like don't send the user email notifications if they're already on the site where they can see the # of notifications?
  - DanielBMarkham 10y ago
    But that's not what they're doing. I'll get mentioned in a comment while I'm on the site. I'll click over and read the comment and reply to it. Then, once I'm away from the computer for 30-60 seconds or so (I'm sure they have a system training for this), I get the email notification -- even if the original back-and-forth occurred an hour ago. The timing of when I get the email has nothing at all to do with when the event occurred. It's completely dependent on my interaction with Facebook. Many times, it takes so long, I'm usually thinking "Wow! I wonder what else X had to say?" but I click over and it's the same damned thing I already interacted with.
    - renaudg 10y ago
      This sounds like a bug / coincidence. I've never got a later email about something that happened live while I was browsing the site, and was already notified about.
      - DanielBMarkham 10y ago
        A couple of times is a coincidence. I stopped counting after seven. So you're saying that there's a bug. And the bug waits for me to stop using Facebook, then emails me things from Facebook. I find this quite difficult to believe. At the least, it's a very convenient bug.
newjersey 10y ago
>algorithmic timelines telling me what happened while I was gone (trust me, twitter...I would have gotten to it eventually), prioritizing what shows up (trust me facebook, I do a very good job hiding content on my own) Absolutely! At least give me an option (even if it is buried nineteen pages beneath about:config) to switch to a simplified reverse chronological stream. Until this happens, I've in followed everyone on Facebook. If you didn't send something specifically to me, then no I definitely didn't see it. (:
amelius 10y ago
What scares me about this is the "bubble" it creates, see [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble (even mentions Facebook's news-stream)
- PavlovsCat 10y ago
  This is a slight tangent, but I don't even like the fact that what I see when I type something into Google may not be what others see. I think the inconvenience of having to type "order pizza in $city" rather than just "order pizza" is more than outweighed by not kind of destroying "consensus reality" as far as it pertains to search results, not to mention the potential for really creepy things down the line. It's not something that bothers me terribly by itself, it may not be important yet, I just don't like the precedent and idea of it. And Facebook just can't seem to remember that I never am interested in whatever it considers "top stories", but always, every time I log on, switch it to "most recent". Not that I know that I actually get all the most recent stuff, but on top of that Facebook is clearly telling me it would prefer me to see its own curation of it, even though I obviously have no interest in that. That this option doesn't stick seems like the intended behaviour, and I consider that yet another hostile aspect of it. So I'll assume whatever they're now doing instead of a UI that deserves the title, it will understand text just fine when it suits advertisers, and will be useless otherwise. Not a claim, but a guess.
  - thesimpsons1022 10y ago
    I read a paper on this recently in class and I think their findings were that most google results are the same other than geographically specific ones like you mentioned. For instance, if we both type "trump", most of the results will be the same unless there is a trump tower near you, in which case it'll direct you to it. Ordering of results however can change.
    - thesimpsons1022 10y ago
      http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/amislove/publications/Geolocation-IMC.pdf http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/amislove/publications/Geolocatio...
morgante 10y ago
> I have no mistakes that these features are probably loved by some, maybe even most, but more and more Count me in the camp that loves them. I don't want to spend hours a day keeping up with social activity. Facebook does a great job of giving me a quick summary of everything going on in my friends' lives by sorting through all the drivel algorithmically.
- PavlovsCat 10y ago
  > Facebook does a great job of giving me a quick summary of everything going on in my friends' lives The only way you can actually know that is to compare the summary with the raw data. The only way to remain sure of it is to keep doing that.
  - morgante 10y ago
    The "raw data" in this case is my friends' lives. Based on my (off-Facebook) interactions with them I remain confident that Facebook does a good job of keeping me up to date on their lives when I use it.
    - jheriko 10y ago
      i can tell you first hand that it does an awful job with my collection of facebook friends. it doesn't prioritise the people i care about most or even the things nearest to me... and more than once has absolutely polluted my feed with someone to the point i considered phoning them to explain why i was about to unfriend them. i'm not saying your experience is untrue... just that facebook haven't done a great job of this for everyone at all.
- sgnelson 10y ago
  "...summary of everything going on in my friends' lives by sorting through all the drivel algorithmically." Sounds like you really care a lot [0]. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1g9PFtSCKw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1g9PFtSCKw
- danieldk 10y ago
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
omarforgotpwd 10y ago
Nobody wants these features, but Facebook doesn't make them for the users. They make them for the advertisers / suppliers to increase sales.
dennyabraham 10y ago
I wonder how well these decision systems stack against random suggestions? I notice it feels like I fixate on the few people or subjects that are regularly presented to me to the exclusion of everyone else.
dclowd9901 10y ago
You also risk exposing yourself merely to an echo chamber as everything is automatically self reinforcing. This is bad stuff -- socially manipulative dark patterns.
- tomc1985 10y ago
  This is almost exactly what it feels like FB and much of the web (even some of HN!) has become/is becoming.
wcummings 10y ago
Yup, this is what will cause me to abandon twitter.
vintermann 10y ago
Well, do you filter your own spam too? The problem to me comes only when the big corporate AI systems no longer are fully on your side, like spam filters which let the "right" spam through.

crypto5 10y ago

Looks like just text classifier, which classifies text snippets by predefined simple intent.

chlestakoff 10y ago
Indeed.

derEitel 10y ago

I would be interested to learn more about their research behind it. Will there be any papers released? Specifically: how much data did they train on? How many machines for how long? How did the different NN architectures perform? I guess those things would be fine to share without revealing the inner workings.

visarga 10y ago
Such results as they published today have become pretty standard in the academic papers. I was wondering why weren't there any cutting edge applications of deep learning in text, as a product. It's probably too expensive to run the necessary hardware to use the latest and greatest ideas.

EGreg 10y ago

Are they going to open source it so that everyone else can use DeepText?

_audakel 10y ago
It seems like a lot of big companies are open sourcing their deep learning stuff. Part of me wonders if they do it because, as people get scared of AI, the federal govt can't come after lots of of small companies using the opensource AI to regulate/fine/shutdown. They could come after just Google or FB once people start loosing lots of jobs to AI, if they where the only kids on the playground.
- derEitel 10y ago
  They are mostly releasing their tools though. The raw diamonds are the trained network weights, it's architecture and the data itself. Releases on those parts we see rarely from private companies.
mark_l_watson 10y ago
It is good publicity and good will to release open source code. They still have their business advantage intact: they have the data and the awesome infrastructure.

wslh 10y ago

Yesterday I mentioned vodka to my wife in Facebook Messenger and a few minutes later she saw a vodka advertisement on her timeline. Obviously Messenger will never include end to end encryption.

mandeepj 10y ago
are you serious? They had to decrypt text so that your wife can read it and that is where they started displaying vodka ads. edit - I meant to say even if they had end-to-end encryption then your text would still need to be decrypted so that other user can read it.
- wslh 10y ago
  Facebook Messenger doesn't have end-to-end encryption, it is stored in Facebook.
  - anfedorov 10y ago
    Not just stored: http://www.cnet.com/news/facebook-scans-chats-and-posts-for-criminal-activity/ http://www.cnet.com/news/facebook-scans-chats-and-posts-for-...
- guelo 10y ago
  End-to-end encryption means the server doesn't know the content of the message. Only the clients, the end-points, have the decryption key.
  - lucb1e 10y ago
    And then the endpoints integrate with ad networks after they've distilled it into topics. I mean, my message contents are personal data. The topics "buy a bike" and "sell a bike" are not (I mean, not by themselves), so those you can transmit to ad companies. Now of course you need to make the detection lightweight enough that you don't need to talk to the server anymore, but that's just a matter of time. The person you're responding to, who's got downvoted, has a point (if this was his point). Edit: I sounded like I agreed with it, which is not the case. Even if it's stored "private and securely" at Facebook, they would still be able to connect my topics of interest with my identity and contacts, which would "technically" comply with the concept of end to end encryption (only metadata leaks because topics alone are metadata, which always happens because you need to route messages)... but which still doesn't comply with my own definition of proper privacy.

Guildpact 10y ago

I wonder if this is in response to Google's open sourcing of Parsey McParseface: http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2016/05/announcing-syntaxnet-worlds-most.html http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2016/05/announcing-syntax...

buskila 10y ago
Or Microsoft's language parser: https://www.microsoft.com/cognitive-services/en-us/language-understanding-intelligent-service-luis https://www.microsoft.com/cognitive-services/en-us/language-...
- deet 10y ago
  Facebook already has Wit.ai which is extremely similar to Microsoft's LUIS, and in some ways more advanced.
tdaltonc 10y ago
except this isn't open source.
deet 10y ago
If this post is a response to anything, it is most similar to Google's recently announced Allo, at least from a product perspective. It's a little tough to figure out what Facebook's goal with the post was though since it's not very technical.

mark_l_watson 10y ago

It is useful to hear what architectures they are using (e.g., BRNNs) and I appreciate the pointer to the original paper. I was hoping for some open source code to read, or more detail on their models. Facebook is pretty good at open sourcing things, so hopefully more papers will be released and open source software as it makes sense for FB to do that. EDIT: typos

samwestdev 10y ago

Everything is deep nowadays. Somebody should do a parody product called DeepBalls

WiseWeasel 10y ago
Makes me wonder what the next AI industry buzzword will be. After Big and Deep, maybe comes Fine or Narrow, Tactful, and finally Aware.

lucb1e 10y ago

My Facebook account was only for public posts and private messages only, to force myself not to post anything that Facebook might consider public as if it were private. This just made me give up on the company altogether. Fun that you guys can train a neural net to deduce what I like better than me, but as they said at the CCC conference, everyone has to decide for themselves how close they are with their machines (though that was in the context of taking your laptop to the toilet, in context of leaving it alone unattended).

johansch 10y ago

I kind of think Google will win over Facebook in this particular war, based on what I have seen so far.

gmantom 10y ago

So I mean this is great but are they open sourcing it? Is there a way for us to play with it? Or are they just bragging?

bvladimir 10y ago

need a hacker? contact whitewiz007@programmer.net they can help change your grades, access email accounts, social networks, clear credits card debts, credit your credit cards, increase credit score and access phones.

ilyaeck 10y ago

Are they actually open-sourcing it? There doesn't seem to be link to the code in sight.

Xeoncross 10y ago

Is this the paper they said they based this on: "Text Understanding from Scratch": http://arxiv.org/abs/1502.01710 http://arxiv.org/abs/1502.01710 Here is example code for text classification from character-level using convolutional networks in Torch 7 https://github.com/zhangxiangxiao/Crepe https://github.com/zhangxiangxiao/Crepe

return0 10y ago

I think FB has a strategy here that plays along well with their messenger (and their emphasis on bots). Imagine the example they give "I would like to sell my old bike for $200, anyone interested?", being matched with another user who said "I am looking for a cheap bike nearby". This plays right into google's territory, with the ability to organize and match people's intentions.

pookieinc 10y ago

Ya know, I normally don't believe in these "Facebook is listening into your conversations"-type voices and opinions because it seems like such an invasion of privacy and the company wouldn't do something like _that_ without permission. However, after a recent episode where I _know_ Facebook was listening to my conversation[1], I'm now much more nervous based on this machine learning news. I've become highly critical and pessimistic when Facebook says things like "Better understanding people's interests" and "New deep neural network architectures", not so much because of what their intent with the data is, but how they receive that data. It's done so sneakily, this is what I disagree with. I normally don't have a problem with Google reading my emails and suggesting news topics on Google Now + my flights, etc., because they ask if they can, but with Facebook, there's an era of creepiness that they are always listening. [1]: This past weekend, a close friend was telling me about his friend who works at Google and the following morning, this Google person came up on my "Friends suggestions". It was the most bizarre thing... I also confirmed with my friend if he looked this Google guy up later on Facebook, which may have prompted his Google friend to show up on mine, and he said he didn't touch Facebook after our conversation. EDIT: For further clarity.

cyphar 10y ago
Why did you think Facebook wouldn't do that? In their view, any content you provide to their site becomes their property. Why wouldn't that include conversations. Considering the fact that everything is unencrypted once it reaches Facebook, it's a mistake to assume good faith on the part of a company that makes its living trying to make you spend more of your life on their website.
- pookieinc 10y ago
  Any content I provide to their site becomes their property is something I understand. However using my mic without specifically asking permission is something else. Yes, I do have their app, but even then, their app on my iPhone does not make my iPhone their property. In all honesty, I actually thought that this was something that phones would prohibit (I use an iPhone), but I was definitely mistaken and surprised by it. Having said all this, it was actually in the news[1] yesterday that Facebook will soon be providing end to end encryption, though I doubt it'll apply to the listening in on people's conversations chatting. [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/31/facebook-messenger-bot-encryption-secure-messaging https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/31/facebook-...

etiam 10y ago

Now we're really well on the way into DeepSh*t. When these things get just a little bit better, the Five Eyes agencies will suddenly not have a staffing problem any more.

nl 10y ago

Well that's a pretty disappointing post: "Hey, we use our deep learning tools on text. Look at this 12 month old paper". Everyone in the field has read that paper. It was good work! But there are lots of intriguing things mentioned in the post which deserve further details. The most interesting thing to me is "more than 20 languages"!! That's pretty nice - the paper had some early results for Chinese, but if it can perform similarly to the English results across 19 other languages that is probably the state-of-the-art for many of them.

uptownfunk 10y ago

Would love to see a compare / contrast between FB/GOOG/MSFT's offerings in this space.

cromwellian 10y ago

Isn't "text understanding engine" a poor description of what is basically a classifier? I'd expect a text understanding engine to do more than classify, I'd expect it to read a bunch of sentences in context and then be able to answer questions about it: John was walking down the stairs. John tripped and fell. John lays on the floor. Describe John's status: Is he hurt or in pain? Is he standing?

aab0 10y ago
Deep learning can do question-answering.
nl 10y ago
Facebook have one of the leading teams on doing Deep Learning question answering. Jason Weston et. al wrote a paper introducing a machine-generated textual dataset[1] similar to what you describe, eg: Daniel picked up the football. Daniel drops the football. Daniel got the milk. Daniel took the apple. How many objects is Daniel holding? There have been plenty other papers published by them and others tackling that and similar but harder problems eg[2] [1]http://arxiv.org/pdf/1502.05698v10.pdf http://arxiv.org/pdf/1502.05698v10.pdf [2] http://arxiv.org/abs/1511.02301 http://arxiv.org/abs/1511.02301
- pimlottc 10y ago
  Can't Daniel just type "inventory"?

tmpanon1234act 10y ago

I know that tech company M.O. is creeping invasiveness by acclimating users to marginally more Orwellian incursions of their privacy over time, but are we already at the point where something like this can gain widespread acceptance? Seems like the willingness of the general populace to prostrate itself to our newfangled corporate overlords is only accelerating.

atrudeau 10y ago

And here I was hoping to see links to published papers or God forbid the release of datasets for fellow researchers... Heck, even a trained model would be nice. Seems like a PR stunt to attract talent.

justsaysmthng 10y ago

> Understanding the various ways text is used on Facebook can help us improve people's experiences with our products You mean show us more "relevant" ads ? Last time I checked, Facebook's *product" was advertising. Thanks, this is exactly what I miss in my life - more ads for products and services I don't need. So excited that Facebook is going to understand everything I'm talking about privately with my "friends" and sell my identity to more ad buyers, who'll design more subliminal ads to squeeze the last millisecond of what's left of my attention span.

themgt 10y ago

Perhaps we're all computer simulations whose purpose is to a/b test marketing on real-world people based on their social media posts.

greenimpala 10y ago

More creepy idealism from the team at Facebook.

hellofunk 10y ago

I feel like the more AI gets into the middle of our online interactions, then the more AI will try to steer those interactions. There is already plenty of evidence that our online behaviour is strongly influenced by algorithms, and I suspect this is just the beginning. One reason why I log onto FB maybe once every couple months; it just feels like I'm being manipulated.

mbrock 10y ago
Eben Moglen: > Facebook is strip-mining human society. Watching everyone share everything in their social lives and instrumenting the web to surveil everything they read outside the system is inherently unethical. > But we need no more from Facebook than truth in labelling. We need no rules, no punishments, no guidelines. We need nothing but the truth. Facebook should lean in and tell its users what it does. > It should say: "We watch you every minute that you're here. We watch every detail of what you do. We have wired the web with 'like' buttons that inform on your reading automatically." > To every parent Facebook should say: "Your children spend hours every day with us. We spy upon them much more efficiently than you will ever be able to. And we won't tell you what we know about them." > Only that, just the truth. That will be enough. But the crowd that runs Facebook, that small bunch of rich and powerful people, will never lean in close enough to tell you the truth.

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