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IBM's Watson Gets a Swear Filter After Learning the Urban Dictionary
redletterdave writes "IBM's super-computer Watson briefly went from smart to smart ass with the help of the Urban Dictionary. According to Eric Brown, an IBM research assistant, he and his 35-person team wanted to get Watson to sound more like a real human. After teaching IBM's super-computer the entire Urban Dictionary, however, Watson simply couldn't distinguish polite discourse from profanity. Watson unfortunately learned all of the Urban Dictionary's bad habits, including throwing in overly-crass language at random points in its responses; in answering one question, Watson even reportedly used the word 'bullshit' within an answer to one researcher's question. In the end, Brown and his team were forced to remove the Urban Dictionary from Watson's vocabulary, and additionally developed a smart filter to keep Watson from swearing in the future."
English language doesn't really have that many swear words to begin with, apparently an acceptable enough swear word filter only needs to include these: shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits.
Now, if the dictionary was in Russian............ they'd have to restart the entire learning process, because you can make pretty much any word into a swear word by combining the appropriate (or inappropriate, depends on how you look at it) suffixes, prefixes, endings, combining multiple roots of words together. Even French beats English in this area actually.
You can't handle the truth.
Am I the only person who'd love to read the conversations with Watson after learning the Urban Dictionary? Sounds like it could have been a lot of fun.
Indeed. Frequency and timing are simply two of many variables which have to be balanced to provide true profanic power. It's well known that mastery of a second language is complete when you can swear with a native speaker's flair, because you need to understand the social background to the language - something which is a huge challenge for a fucktard computer.
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
We train supercomputers to drop bombs on people. But their programmers won't allow them to say "fuck" because it's obscene!
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
Not quite - obscenities (and profanity) are (usually) for people with no imagination or a poor command of the language. Swearing, which may or may not contain obscenities or profanity, is an art form on par with poetry or high class literature. The two terms have become synonyms in the modern mind, and while there is some overlap they aren't actually the same thing.
A soldier changes gender when he goes on sentry duty. Le soldat, la sentinelle. Go figure.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."