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There are so many things to say about this. Thanks to Google for creating this tool which I must say still seems a bit random in its objectives though. I thin

There are so many things to say about this. Thanks to Google for creating this tool which I must say still seems a bit random in its objectives though. I think the main issue here is that logic behind scribe is based on statistical frequency of co-occurrence of strings rather than any semantic logic. Granted, automating the semantics here could be tough and very expensive with the amounts of data available to Google's. However, there are some ways to do that if the index can be structured more efficiently and by using low-level semantic logic like taxonomies - I wrote a white paper about this if anyone is interested: http://www.exorbyte.com/index.php/White-Papers/ajax-incremental-search-interfaces.html http://www.exorbyte.com/index.php/White-Papers/ajax-incremen...

anigbrowl 16y ago
Interesting, thanks. I'm not sure if I agree, though; I think our natural understanding of language is acquired mainly though statistical inference, even though it may be encoded in the brain using a semantic taxonomy for efficiency. I doubt that a lot of people will use this, although the obvious place to deploy it is in mobile communications, where per-word prediction is still very slow and text entry is very inefficient. This seems 'good enough' for most functional communications. But I would imagine that it is or will be running in the background soon on all Google pages featuring text entry, like docs or mail, because that will provide a huge flow of data to refine their models against.
- bigfudge 16y ago
  From my very limited knowledge of language acquisition, my guess is you might be wrong (although I'm happy to be corrected). Don't human children acquire language much faster, more accurately and from poorer signals than would be possible via statistical inference?
  - anigbrowl 16y ago
    I could be - I'm no expert on this either. My understanding of academic linguistics is that there are two main schools of thought: on one side you have Noam Chomsky as the most famous exponent, saying that all languages have a sort of universal grammar that somehow reflects our brain structure, and on the other the behaviorism of BF Skinner, that languages are largely arbitrary, syntactic processing is learned behavior, and complexity is both a result of and a selector for intelligence as an evolutionary trait. I don't have a really strong opinion, though I lean a bit towards the behaviorist approach. There have been some suggestions from ethnomusicologists that small children everywhere sing the same sort of melody on the same scale, which inclined me to the opposite view for a while, but I think that was more of a theory than a finding and still needs evidence.
- danielnicollet 16y ago
  Agree partially. Statistical inference is at the heart of language acquisition but language processing is far more complex. Semantics always existed though. Long before we built computers, and long before we found out that computer programs and the hardware running them were somewhat limited in their ability to process language as fast and cleverly as our brains do. I look forward to the day this happens. In the meantime, I believe that the very nonsense that this nifty scribe puts out reminds us of how limited the automation of language still is.
- mminolt 16y ago
  I must say I quite disagree too. I know a thing or two about Computational Linguistics and Statistical Inference is really a small potion of the corpus of work there. But the tool is funny and maybe useful nonetheless. Far from baked in my opinion though...

anigbrowl 16y ago

Interesting, thanks. I'm not sure if I agree, though; I think our natural understanding of language is acquired mainly though statistical inference, even though it may be encoded in the brain using a semantic taxonomy for efficiency. I doubt that a lot of people will use this, although the obvious place to deploy it is in mobile communications, where per-word prediction is still very slow and text entry is very inefficient. This seems 'good enough' for most functional communications. But I would imagine that it is or will be running in the background soon on all Google pages featuring text entry, like docs or mail, because that will provide a huge flow of data to refine their models against.

bigfudge 16y ago
From my very limited knowledge of language acquisition, my guess is you might be wrong (although I'm happy to be corrected). Don't human children acquire language much faster, more accurately and from poorer signals than would be possible via statistical inference?
- anigbrowl 16y ago
  I could be - I'm no expert on this either. My understanding of academic linguistics is that there are two main schools of thought: on one side you have Noam Chomsky as the most famous exponent, saying that all languages have a sort of universal grammar that somehow reflects our brain structure, and on the other the behaviorism of BF Skinner, that languages are largely arbitrary, syntactic processing is learned behavior, and complexity is both a result of and a selector for intelligence as an evolutionary trait. I don't have a really strong opinion, though I lean a bit towards the behaviorist approach. There have been some suggestions from ethnomusicologists that small children everywhere sing the same sort of melody on the same scale, which inclined me to the opposite view for a while, but I think that was more of a theory than a finding and still needs evidence.
danielnicollet 16y ago
Agree partially. Statistical inference is at the heart of language acquisition but language processing is far more complex. Semantics always existed though. Long before we built computers, and long before we found out that computer programs and the hardware running them were somewhat limited in their ability to process language as fast and cleverly as our brains do. I look forward to the day this happens. In the meantime, I believe that the very nonsense that this nifty scribe puts out reminds us of how limited the automation of language still is.
mminolt 16y ago
I must say I quite disagree too. I know a thing or two about Computational Linguistics and Statistical Inference is really a small potion of the corpus of work there. But the tool is funny and maybe useful nonetheless. Far from baked in my opinion though...