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Crédit Mutuel (a french bank) has adopted Watson [0] and it's not encouraging : it was supposed to help answering emails, : they had to describe manually the co

by tangue 9y ago

Crédit Mutuel (a french bank) has adopted Watson [0] and it's not encouraging : it was supposed to help answering emails, : they had to describe manually the concepts in emails and create topics in which looks a lot like decision-trees (and reminds me of this 1985 ad for Texas Instrument's Lisp AI https://www.scientificamerican.com/media/inline/blog/File/Dewdney_Mandelbrot.pdf https://www.scientificamerican.com/media/inline/blog/File/De... scroll to see the ad) Indeed the whole thing looks like a database with basic AI as a sales argument... [0 - in french] http://www.silicon.fr/credit-mutuel-non-ia-watson-magique-173889.html http://www.silicon.fr/credit-mutuel-non-ia-watson-magique-17...

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Spooky23 9y ago
Totally. I observed a support chatbot project that didn't quite meet up with the vision. Even based on the technical marketing claims the consultants were coming in with, it was a product less capable than the IBM Prolog-based expert systems that I built out 15-20 years ago to triage and correlate network events in a large WAN infrastructure.... and that was a product with a whole slew of major implementation and operational problems!
- fapjacks 9y ago
  Hey just wondering: Have you written about your exploits before? If so, where can I read about them? Sounds interesting.
  - seanp2k2 9y ago
    It's not just interesting, it's C-O-M-C-A-S-T-I-C!
  - Spooky23 9y ago
    I haven't other than on HN, but I've been lucky in that I've had the opportunity to participate in some awesome and not-awesome stuff. Maybe I will start!
- yourapostasy 9y ago
  > ...product less capable than the IBM Prolog-based expert systems that I built out 15-20 years ago to triage and correlate network events in a large WAN infrastructure... That sounds like IBM Tivoli Enterprise Console (TEC). They wrapped a big Prolog-based DSL that the users wrote their correlation rules in, around the underlying Prolog engine. You could dip into the raw Prolog if you wanted, but it was considered an advanced user technique. The vast majority of "advanced" users used the set of cookbook Prolog functions the DSL was represented as, and even more users only ever touched a GUI that represented a tiny subset of that cookbook. People figured out what parts of Prolog the Prolog engine actually supported mostly through trial and error at first, before IBM finally published more details about it. This rules-based approach ran into the same challenges of expert systems: beyond a certain threshhold number of rules, reasoning about the rules logic became dramatically more difficult. It didn't help that IBM never supplied support tooling for the underlying Prolog engine to aid in performance profiling, debugging, build support, etc. The lesson I drew from that experience is if you supply your users with an embedded language in your app, make sure the advanced users get access to the kind of tooling full developers want. It is interesting to see that the Watson-Jeopardy system uses Prolog [1]. I have to wonder how much of that was re-purposed to the chatbot project you observed. If it was, then its disappointment might be predictable; the range of possible problem spaces in a support setting is going to be larger than the relatively more constrained NLP of the Jeopardy format. I've yet to see a good NLP system oriented towards technical software support, backed by a support knowledge base, that functions substantially better than current text searching and result ranking technologies, so I'd be very interested to hear about other people's positive results with applying machine learning to this area. [1] https://www.cs.nmsu.edu/ALP/2011/03/natural-language-processing-with-prolog-in-the-ibm-watson-system/ https://www.cs.nmsu.edu/ALP/2011/03/natural-language-process...
  - Spooky23 9y ago
    You guessed it! Based on a mailing list post, a colleague and I figured out how to pull facts in from an Oracle database and then pull in facts from there about system or MIB relationships. We started with a really promising system that would let us call out to compiled python code and pull in some more capability. But by that time, we finished the original project and moved on.
- shpx 9y ago
  Chatbots are glorified command line interfaces. With no man pages.
  - yellow_postit 9y ago
    Most reply to 'help' with a list of commands
  - JSONwebtoken 9y ago
    Sure, if you ignore the advancements of NLP in the past few years. Sometimes I wish I had NLP in my terminal to autocorrect my typos.
    - Spooky23 9y ago
      NLP is amazing. But getting facts and information into a chat bot is not easy or cheap. Typically people are deploying chatbots as a cost cutting measure to reduce labor. Sometimes that means using the chatbot as a fancy IVR, getting customers to abandon the transaction or any of several other paths. Actually answering the questions doesn't always matter!
    - gsnedders 9y ago
      And NLG.
_wmd 9y ago
Side note: whatever happened to article-sized advertising from computer periodicals? Just like this one, they actually manage to be informative while remaining sober and honest about their intention. Not to mention it includes enough prose to develop a serious flow and style.. you can't fit that into a banner ad
sgt101 9y ago
Which is odd as the Jeff Dean pattern of "small feedforward network to say if this mail can be answered and then deep rnn to create an answer" seems to actually work. So how come IBM haven't just lifted it?
kaimaoi 9y ago
That reminds me of this: https://twitter.com/iamdevloper/status/830070592611172357 https://twitter.com/iamdevloper/status/830070592611172357
pron 9y ago
You speak as if AI is something that actually exists. The term AI is always a sales pitch (or the name of a field of research). In the '50s and '60s they called various symbol manipulation programs AI; later it was expert systems; now it's statistical clustering.

by tangue 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

Spooky23 9y ago

Totally. I observed a support chatbot project that didn't quite meet up with the vision. Even based on the technical marketing claims the consultants were coming in with, it was a product less capable than the IBM Prolog-based expert systems that I built out 15-20 years ago to triage and correlate network events in a large WAN infrastructure.... and that was a product with a whole slew of major implementation and operational problems!

fapjacks 9y ago
Hey just wondering: Have you written about your exploits before? If so, where can I read about them? Sounds interesting.
- seanp2k2 9y ago
  It's not just interesting, it's C-O-M-C-A-S-T-I-C!
- Spooky23 9y ago
  I haven't other than on HN, but I've been lucky in that I've had the opportunity to participate in some awesome and not-awesome stuff. Maybe I will start!
yourapostasy 9y ago
> ...product less capable than the IBM Prolog-based expert systems that I built out 15-20 years ago to triage and correlate network events in a large WAN infrastructure... That sounds like IBM Tivoli Enterprise Console (TEC). They wrapped a big Prolog-based DSL that the users wrote their correlation rules in, around the underlying Prolog engine. You could dip into the raw Prolog if you wanted, but it was considered an advanced user technique. The vast majority of "advanced" users used the set of cookbook Prolog functions the DSL was represented as, and even more users only ever touched a GUI that represented a tiny subset of that cookbook. People figured out what parts of Prolog the Prolog engine actually supported mostly through trial and error at first, before IBM finally published more details about it. This rules-based approach ran into the same challenges of expert systems: beyond a certain threshhold number of rules, reasoning about the rules logic became dramatically more difficult. It didn't help that IBM never supplied support tooling for the underlying Prolog engine to aid in performance profiling, debugging, build support, etc. The lesson I drew from that experience is if you supply your users with an embedded language in your app, make sure the advanced users get access to the kind of tooling full developers want. It is interesting to see that the Watson-Jeopardy system uses Prolog [1]. I have to wonder how much of that was re-purposed to the chatbot project you observed. If it was, then its disappointment might be predictable; the range of possible problem spaces in a support setting is going to be larger than the relatively more constrained NLP of the Jeopardy format. I've yet to see a good NLP system oriented towards technical software support, backed by a support knowledge base, that functions substantially better than current text searching and result ranking technologies, so I'd be very interested to hear about other people's positive results with applying machine learning to this area. [1] https://www.cs.nmsu.edu/ALP/2011/03/natural-language-processing-with-prolog-in-the-ibm-watson-system/ https://www.cs.nmsu.edu/ALP/2011/03/natural-language-process...
- Spooky23 9y ago
  You guessed it! Based on a mailing list post, a colleague and I figured out how to pull facts in from an Oracle database and then pull in facts from there about system or MIB relationships. We started with a really promising system that would let us call out to compiled python code and pull in some more capability. But by that time, we finished the original project and moved on.
shpx 9y ago
Chatbots are glorified command line interfaces. With no man pages.
- yellow_postit 9y ago
  Most reply to 'help' with a list of commands
- JSONwebtoken 9y ago
  Sure, if you ignore the advancements of NLP in the past few years. Sometimes I wish I had NLP in my terminal to autocorrect my typos.
  - Spooky23 9y ago
    NLP is amazing. But getting facts and information into a chat bot is not easy or cheap. Typically people are deploying chatbots as a cost cutting measure to reduce labor. Sometimes that means using the chatbot as a fancy IVR, getting customers to abandon the transaction or any of several other paths. Actually answering the questions doesn't always matter!
  - gsnedders 9y ago
    And NLG.

_wmd 9y ago

Side note: whatever happened to article-sized advertising from computer periodicals? Just like this one, they actually manage to be informative while remaining sober and honest about their intention. Not to mention it includes enough prose to develop a serious flow and style.. you can't fit that into a banner ad

sgt101 9y ago

Which is odd as the Jeff Dean pattern of "small feedforward network to say if this mail can be answered and then deep rnn to create an answer" seems to actually work. So how come IBM haven't just lifted it?

kaimaoi 9y ago

That reminds me of this: https://twitter.com/iamdevloper/status/830070592611172357 https://twitter.com/iamdevloper/status/830070592611172357

pron 9y ago

You speak as if AI is something that actually exists. The term AI is always a sales pitch (or the name of a field of research). In the '50s and '60s they called various symbol manipulation programs AI; later it was expert systems; now it's statistical clustering.