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I think this is a bit too cynical/negative. It's not true that neural net approaches don't work, they just have different strengths and weaknesses (strength bei

I think this is a bit too cynical/negative. It's not true that neural net approaches don't work, they just have different strengths and weaknesses (strength being generalization/flexibility/ease of use, weakness being long term coherence, interpretability, reliability). There are plenty of examples of traditional methods being combined with neural net methods (eg https://ai.stanford.edu/blog/qagnn/ https://ai.stanford.edu/blog/qagnn/ , https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.04799 https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.04799 , NeRF), and I think that is likely to happen in this context as well to some extent.

YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
I really don't see generalisation, flexibility and ease of use (!) as strengths of neural networks and I'm shocked you think any of those are actually characteristics of neural networks. To clarify I didn't mean that neural network approaches don't work. I meant that they don't work _for story generation_ certainly not if the goal is to generate coherent stories. In the article, the best examples of stories generated from neural network approaches (basically, nn-trained language models + x, where x is various clever tricks that try to patch up the gaping holes in neural nets' inability to generate a coherent story) look decidedly worse than the stories generated by symbolic approaches listed in earlier sections. In my mind, the author of the article is being polite and trying to present the latest work in his field in a positive manner, possibly because of the natural tendency of researchers to not take a huge dump on each other's work. But some of the expressions he uses, like "in case we find opportunities to avoid throwing the baby out with the bath water" make it clear that he doesn't see the takeover of his field by neural networks as a step forward. Btw, "cynical"? Should I take that as a personal comment? It sounds a little insulting.

YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago

I really don't see generalisation, flexibility and ease of use (!) as strengths of neural networks and I'm shocked you think any of those are actually characteristics of neural networks. To clarify I didn't mean that neural network approaches don't work. I meant that they don't work _for story generation_ certainly not if the goal is to generate coherent stories. In the article, the best examples of stories generated from neural network approaches (basically, nn-trained language models + x, where x is various clever tricks that try to patch up the gaping holes in neural nets' inability to generate a coherent story) look decidedly worse than the stories generated by symbolic approaches listed in earlier sections. In my mind, the author of the article is being polite and trying to present the latest work in his field in a positive manner, possibly because of the natural tendency of researchers to not take a huge dump on each other's work. But some of the expressions he uses, like "in case we find opportunities to avoid throwing the baby out with the bath water" make it clear that he doesn't see the takeover of his field by neural networks as a step forward. Btw, "cynical"? Should I take that as a personal comment? It sounds a little insulting.