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I don’t think that’s a flaw! The study is “95% of paint splatters” not “95% of random strings of ASCII characters”. If common OCR programs are optimized to prod

I don’t think that’s a flaw! The study is “95% of paint splatters” not “95% of random strings of ASCII characters”. If common OCR programs are optimized to produce letters and spaces, fair game! (You would of course want a “proper” scientific study to be more rigorous about these things.) Edit: Also, the programs in the article appear to be mostly special characters?

lucideer 5y ago
> Edit: Also, the programs in the article appear to be mostly special characters? I assume you mean the 4 listed in the "Errata" section? The full list is here: https://www.mcmillen.dev/sigbovik/splatters.html https://www.mcmillen.dev/sigbovik/splatters.html
Dylan16807 5y ago
> I don’t think that’s a flaw! The study is “95% of paint splatters” not “95% of random strings of ASCII characters”. If common OCR programs are optimized to produce letters and spaces, fair game! But if someone said "95% of paint splatters OCR as Welsh words" and it turned out that's because the OCR is looking for words, it doesn't say much interesting about Welsh like the title implies. > Edit: Also, the programs in the article appear to be mostly special characters? Look at the whole gallery though. Most of the OCR results are just a string of letters or a number. Those being valid is very mundane. Edit: Actually if you want to make the analogy super precise, you could say "oh yeah those strings of letters are just proper nouns, which makes them valid Welsh, and of course numbers are valid Welsh"
- Wowfunhappy 5y ago
  > But if someone said "95% of paint splatters OCR as Welsh words" and it turned out that's because the OCR is looking for words, it doesn't say much interesting about Welsh like the title implies. I think it depends on the claim, right? IMO, a more analogous statement might be "95% of paint splatters OCR as grammatically-correct Welsh sentences." Unless the software is using something like GPT-3, that finding would be notable regardless of software tuning. Even if it tells us more about Welsh grammar than it does paint splatters. > Look at the whole gallery though. Most of the OCR results are just a string of letters or a number. Those being valid is very mundane. Yes, thanks, my mistake!
  - Dylan16807 5y ago
    > IMO, a more analogous statement might be "95% of paint splatters OCR as grammatically-correct Welsh sentences." Unless the software is using something like GPT-3, that finding would be notable regardless of software tuning. Even if it tells us more about Welsh grammar than it does paint splatters. Well, I'd argue that "potato" is a grammatically correct sentence in most languages. (Imagine someone asked you what kind of soup you're holding.) And so is "7" and so is "Fififz". And that's literally what's happening with Perl with the vast majority of these. It's treating a single word/number as a statement. If you want to say something notable about grammar, you need to be generating sentences that are longer than a single noun.

lucideer 5y ago

> Edit: Also, the programs in the article appear to be mostly special characters? I assume you mean the 4 listed in the "Errata" section? The full list is here: https://www.mcmillen.dev/sigbovik/splatters.html https://www.mcmillen.dev/sigbovik/splatters.html

Dylan16807 5y ago

> I don’t think that’s a flaw! The study is “95% of paint splatters” not “95% of random strings of ASCII characters”. If common OCR programs are optimized to produce letters and spaces, fair game! But if someone said "95% of paint splatters OCR as Welsh words" and it turned out that's because the OCR is looking for words, it doesn't say much interesting about Welsh like the title implies. > Edit: Also, the programs in the article appear to be mostly special characters? Look at the whole gallery though. Most of the OCR results are just a string of letters or a number. Those being valid is very mundane. Edit: Actually if you want to make the analogy super precise, you could say "oh yeah those strings of letters are just proper nouns, which makes them valid Welsh, and of course numbers are valid Welsh"

Wowfunhappy 5y ago
> But if someone said "95% of paint splatters OCR as Welsh words" and it turned out that's because the OCR is looking for words, it doesn't say much interesting about Welsh like the title implies. I think it depends on the claim, right? IMO, a more analogous statement might be "95% of paint splatters OCR as grammatically-correct Welsh sentences." Unless the software is using something like GPT-3, that finding would be notable regardless of software tuning. Even if it tells us more about Welsh grammar than it does paint splatters. > Look at the whole gallery though. Most of the OCR results are just a string of letters or a number. Those being valid is very mundane. Yes, thanks, my mistake!
- Dylan16807 5y ago
  > IMO, a more analogous statement might be "95% of paint splatters OCR as grammatically-correct Welsh sentences." Unless the software is using something like GPT-3, that finding would be notable regardless of software tuning. Even if it tells us more about Welsh grammar than it does paint splatters. Well, I'd argue that "potato" is a grammatically correct sentence in most languages. (Imagine someone asked you what kind of soup you're holding.) And so is "7" and so is "Fififz". And that's literally what's happening with Perl with the vast majority of these. It's treating a single word/number as a statement. If you want to say something notable about grammar, you need to be generating sentences that are longer than a single noun.