Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
What pushed them over the edge is when Watson suggested that they "bite my shiny metal ass".
Warning: This sig is not thread safe. For more information see Slashdot's sig policy.
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 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