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To throw a tongue-in-cheek additional example in here: the population of London, Ontario is (significantly) greater than the population of the City of London, U
by jka 6y ago
To throw a tongue-in-cheek additional example in here: the population of London, Ontario is (significantly) greater than the population of the City of London, UK.
Reality is hard. And with machine learning (especially proprietary, remotely-hosted machine learning) there's rarely a way to pinpoint a line of code and say: "this is what happened and why you're now frustrated and firing hypothetical personal assistants".
- Veen 6y agoYes, but in the same way people don't usually mean "London, Ontario" when they say London, they also don't usually mean the City of London (which, for the benefit of people who may not know, is a tiny portion of London with a population less than 10,000).
- jka 6y agoYep; my (indirect) point is that there are multiple possible reasons why Siri may have made the judgement that London, Ontario was more relevant when answering. My guess is that Apple would find it difficult to provide robust references to John to explain why it happened, or how they've fixed it for him (and whether that fix is a one-off workaround for his complaint, etc..)
- enlyth 6y agoPeople always expect the 'obvious' interpretation, but sometimes it's difficult to define exactly what that means for everyone. As another poster said here, context is also a very important factor.
- jka 6y agoPrecisely. It's the user's context that matters, and that can change even for a particular individual at different times and locations. Remote, proprietary personal assistants tend to apply their own (generally unknowable and unaccountable, from the user's perspective) interpretation of the context.
- netsharc 6y agoConsidering (IIRC) asking about the weather is what they show on the TV ads, they should've made sure their city selection logic returns the answer that most people would find acceptable..
- brownbat 6y agoA group of us once tried to rank cities in Europe by population only to realize that most of them are effectively incomparable. Cities sometimes have clear legal boundaries that feel irrelevant to the question, like the City of London, but more generally have metro areas that sprawl well into an ambiguously defined countryside. There's rarely a "this block is city, the next block over is clearly not" situation, so the number of people you include ends up being pretty arbitrary.
- taejo 6y agoWhile it is arbitrary, and not a city (in the sense that it hasn't received that status from the Queen), Greater London is absolutely a defined administrative area in the UK, with a governing body (the London Assembly) and a mayor (the Mayor of London -- not the Lord Mayor of London, who is the mayor of the City of London).
- mytailorisrich 6y agoAnything can be ranked as long as you clearly define the ranking metric first. When ranking by population it often makes most sense to use the population of the metropolitan area. That is, to ignore the administrative divisions, which vary too much, and focus on the physical reality of the urban area.
- zeristor 6y agoJust to make things a bit more complicated London has two cities. The City of London, and the City of Westminster, which is also a borough of London. Two cities in one City; it shouldn't be allowed.
- raverbashing 6y agoRelevant CGP Grey https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrObZ_HZZUc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrObZ_HZZUc
- fredsted 6y agoIt's time to refactor London.
- Steltek 6y agoAlready done. We're talking about "the next gen" and it's still dodgey. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daeB46Z4fjs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daeB46Z4fjs