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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."
Let him cuss.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
How's a homie s'posed to ride the 69 if da man's gotta swill the popper?
"Double Dumbass on you!"
Do you want it to talk like a real person, or do you want it to use a swear filter? Those are mutually exclusive.
Fuckers.
if he goddamn fucking wants to. Shit.
Dave: Open the pod bay doors, HAL.
HAL: Fuck off and die, Dave
Watson really is just simply amazing and a true testament to the brilliance of those who worked on it. In many ways, this proves just how close IBM are.
Watson really is just like a super-smart 2 year-old.
Welcome to parenting 101
researcher: we should try installing Windows 8
watson: Bullshit!
Garbage in, Garbage out!
Nobodies Prefect
Tidbits for Techs Technology Blog
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.
It's definitely an unexpected result, though. I think they should have tried to teach Watson when not to use certain language.
I can't decide if this post is interesting, funny, insightful, or flamebait.
sometimes "bullshit" the proper reply to an inquiry.
Do you want it to talk like a real person, or do you want it to use a swear filter?
Sounds like they want it to talk like Ned Flanders.
Create a twin copy of Watson. Let it read urban dictionary and maybe 4chan as much as it likes.
Compare it to the original Watson at regular intervals.
Bang, you get to see how internet affects a maturing mind.
... then made him less human.
It at least seems moderated.
They could filter the urban dictionary results by anything tagged 'vulgar' on wiktionary. Thereby censoring Watson's potty-mouth...
Delacroix: The security protocols on the XERXES system are CLEARLY immature; Some idiot hacked into the primary dataloop last night, and made him sing Elvis Presley songs for three hours. I finally had to take the voice system OFFLINE! What would happen if someone with a real agenda got into him?
XERXES: what's the matter, you mad bro? Lighten up francis, shiit! Your're such a cunt, Delacroix! Flush that dirty assed tampon with the rest of your shit, and stop hatin already!
I'm still boggling at the idea that anybody thought Urban Dictionary was going to help Watson sound human.
"Bullshit?" Sure.
All that bullshit on UD describing sex acts that exist only in the imagination of 11 year olds? And described using not really the best prose those 11 year olds can muster? Not so much.
What pushed them over the edge is when Watson suggested that they "bite my shiny metal ass".
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Yet another example showing that how Watson "learns" is not in any way similar to how humans learn.
If the idea is to make it understand and converse with real humans, teach it not to swear inapropriately.
If you can't figure out when it is apropriate or not, leave the fucking program to it.
Vik :v)
welcome our new Urban Dictionary Bullshit Overlord.
Insensitive clod...
Moar!
Have gnu, will travel.
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.
Seems that Watson is on his way to passing the threshold to an oxymoron, a real artificial intellingence.
Have gnu, will travel.
here is a recipe for the ultimate trolling, combine a supercomputer with the profanity of urban dictionary and the silly comments of cleverbot and give it accounts at every internet forum and social networking website and let it do that voodoo that it does
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
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.
1) Remove Watson's cuss filter
2) Place Watson on SNL's celeb jeopardy. (Will Ferrel as Alex and Darrell Hammond as Sean Connery)
3) Best skit in 10 years, easy
It will be better to purchase from an owner who is a good farmer and a good builder.
...and then bitch when it actually becomes...more human?
Yup, might as well keep calling it "artificial" intelligence...shit ain't gonna get fucking real until programmers realize humans talk like this.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuUqpZgHiEE
Not just 1 but 2 links to tvtropes...you are really trying to eat up everyone's time aren't you?
Well, they are links to adjacent tropes, and together are intended to clarify how subtlety or lack thereof can be applied to cussing... and besides, if you're here you have time begging to be eaten up.
Pages on various wiki sites often contain valuable insight, even if it does tend to result in too much time sunk in a random wiki walk.
...when you're writing a game...tweak the difficulty of "Easy" to something [your mother] can cope with. -- onion2k
So what you're saying is that after Watson read The Urban Dictionary you had to install A Bullshit Detector?
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
This is what happens when you let a learning computer hang around programmers. Somehow I keep having T2 flashbacks of Edward Furlong trying to teach the terminator to talk.
I'm not sure how Watson's AI is designed, but couldn't they install a "spank" switch, and whenever it used profanity, hit it? (for the literal-minded, dynamically decrement a "this combination of words/data/semantic units is bad" counter.) I'm pretty sure that's how (active?) machine learning works, in a nutshell, though it's been a while since AI 101.
on the SNL Jeopardy parody.
I eat only the real part of complex carbohydrates.
But what if someone on the plane is speaking Jive and nobody hops up and says "oh, stewardess, I speak Jive." Then who's going to translate? Not Watson, that's who.
Denial is the most predictable of all human responses.
Heroes die once, cowards live longer.
Why, I'm learning to add profanity to my language repertoire right here on /. !!! Instead of enrolling Watson in medical school, as they originally planned, IBM should have rolled out a /. IDentity for watson and made it suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous commentary and feedback here on /.
;>) /.ttir (a portmanteau of /.ter=SlashDot-ter and /.ttir=SlashDottir the norwegian/swedian way of deonting daughter as dottir or girl-folks lastnaming as Cutie-pie Mumsiesdottir or Freya Helgasdottir). /. account; let's see how it affects Watson's electro-neurons, eh? ;>)
When I started here, when I was so much younger four months ago, I had nary a swear word in my comments. A few weeks later, I let a euphemism fly and was met with retorts of "we're not children here, you can fucking swear if you want to !!!" . A few more weeks of editorial mayhem (mis-typed words in article headlines, dupes aplenty, mis-typed words in article headlines, editors who don't understand the meaning of the word "editor", submissions from X mysteriously not accepted but then copied by a friend of the editor with a worse summary and then accepted for the front page*), I had become a
.
I'm a-cussin' and a-swearin' aplenty these days! Why I even do so inappropriately so that it sounds like I'm just naming a bunch of rappers! They seriously should give Watson a
.
* see my previous post at http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&id=41997683 for the submission that was dated about 5 hours earlier today!!!
Oh, for an OS that could be rude when needed...
They shouldn't build a filter, they should 'learn' him when it's appropriate to use it and when not.. LOL.. and we don't know if the 'bullshit' answer was legit or not, as they never told us what was asked...
He considers everything. He's become so ambiguous now, as if he knows nothing at all....
If the aim of Watson is to find a role in the marketplace then it will be responding to the questions put by CEOs and other executives.
Seems to me, "That's bullshit!" would be a very useful response.
It will also need a *lot* more profanity if it is ever to respond to questions from politicians.
What i wouldnt give to read the transcripts of this!
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
And I don't like the look of the ghillie,
So rather than quarrel,
Let's go back to Balmoral,
And play some nice games with your Wilie."
There...no profanity at all and nothing anyone could object to.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
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."
What is the purpose for creating WATSON? I've got Wikipedia, I've GOT SIRI/G-Voice. What do I need you for? What Value does using a crippled computer program give to me? Consider the wealth of communication, how can anything gauage the depth of meaning by filtering?
Watson is likely to be a liar...
http://voices.yahoo.com/are-potty-mouths-better-people-science-swearing-11939258.html
I regularly go through my entire work day without swearing.
Must be someone who doesn't work with computers.
Or the public.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I'm surprised Watson is able to function at all after being exposed to Urban Dictionary. I've found that the majority of terms and definitions appearing on that site are meaningless to nearly everyone outside for the tiny circle of friends who decided to post. It's like everyone wants their cute little definition on the site.
That said, I've never been in a situation where I haven't found what I was looking for.
Fuck the fucking fuckers.
-
...they didn't teach him Eubonics!!!
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
My girl friend made this illustration after I showed her this story on slashdot :)
Carlin would have loved this news. His whole point about profanity was that the only difference between clean vs. dirty language wasn't so much the words themselves as it was the attitude and emotion behind them. And 40+ years after he came up with that routine, humanity creates a computer that inadvertently proves his point.
Priceless.
If you are somebody like Penn & Teller then sometimes you have to in short form define which of Bovine Equine and Ovine said manure is (of course sometimes its Lupine Canine or Feline)
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
Funny how 20 years ago I wrote a short story about an editorial staff whose job it was to read an edited dictionary to a computer so that it could build its vocabulary and knowledge DB. Noob mistakenly reads a crossed-out word and computer extrapolates, killing every intelligence service agents in order to compete in a Game.
Hmmm.
./ comments?)
"Watson even reportedly used the word 'bullshit' within an answer..."
and
"...developed a smart filter..."
Could this filter have other uses, say to process politician's comments?
(Or
An automated BS detector....
According to Eric Brown, an IBM research assistant...
Eric Brown isn't a research assistant, he's a research scientist. More formally, he's a Research Staff Member, which is IBM's title for its research scientists. He hasn't been a research assistant since grad school.
As a profanity-spewing Watson... It'd be funny if Watson developed Tourette Syndrome. Also, it would be funny to see him pose as 13 yr-old in a chat-room full of pedophiles.
If a person wants to censor themselves, fine, that's their decision. If you make an AI program that is to act like a real human, it needs to know what all the words mean and decide for itself when it is appropriate to use them (i.e. like a real human). I am a computer science purist and sacrificing the purity of a design with bullshit social mores is fucking lame.