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Google's Sentiment Analyzer Thinks Being Gay Is Bad (vice.com)
gooddogsgotoheaven shares a report from Motherboard: In July 2016, Google announced the public beta launch of a new machine learning application program interface (API), called the Cloud Natural Language API. It allows developers to incorporate Google's deep learning models into their own applications. As the company said in its announcement of the API, it lets you "easily reveal the structure and meaning of your text in a variety of languages." In addition to entity recognition (deciphering what's being talked about in a text) and syntax analysis (parsing the structure of that text), the API included a sentiment analyzer to allow programs to determine the degree to which sentences expressed a negative or positive sentiment, on a scale of -1 to 1. The problem is the API labels sentences about religious and ethnic minorities as negative -- indicating it's inherently biased. For example, it labels both being a Jew and being a homosexual as negative. A Google spokesperson issued the following statement in response to Motherboard's request for comment: "We dedicate a lot of efforts to making sure the NLP API avoids bias, but we don't always get it right. This is an example of one of those times, and we are sorry. We take this seriously and are working on improving our models. We will correct this specific case, and, more broadly, building more inclusive algorithms is crucial to bringing the benefits of machine learning to everyone."
If you've already decided that being homosexual (or a Jew, or a redhead, or a lefty, you name it) must not be deemed negative, why do you need analysis at all?
Anyway, here is a constructive suggestion: define more precisely what "negative" is. (Things like this are sorely needed IRL too, where people e.g. routinely use statistical norm as an argument in ethical discussions.)
Read this if you can stomach it. You might stop reading when he describes is anus prolapsing out of his anus. (His anus turned inside out and fell out). Yes I'm scared to hell of sodomy and what it can do to society. So it is my business.
http://josephsciambra.com/surviving-gaybarely/
I'm gay and I think being gay is "bad". I wouldn't wish it on anyone growing up. It makes life more difficult. Dating pool is much smaller. There's still homophobia everywhere. If I had a kid I wouldn't want them to be gay, I'd want them to have a chance at a "normal" life. I'd be absolutely loving and accepting if they were gay but I don't want them to have to go through any of the shit I did.
I can see why gay would end up with a -.
Also, some people hate being exposed to facts that interfere with their beliefs, such as black people commit 217 times more violent crimes, gay men are 12 times more likely to be pedophiles, etc.
You are guilty of the same behavior you're pretending to be smugly self-righteous about.
Consider that childless homosexuals, not being burdened by the task of having to care for children of their own, will likely therefore have extra time and resources available to help protect and care for the children of child-bearing couples in their family or community
Yeah, that's definitely how it goes in the real world. Did you have a source but forgot to cite it?
I'm gay and I think being gay is "bad".
I am straight and I think gays are "good". Gay tend to be DINKs (double income no kids), so they have high household incomes and can afford nice houses. They pay property taxes to support the schools, but don't have kids, leading to higher per student educational spending. They contribute to a thriving urban culture and nightlife.
I live in the SF Bay Area, and gays are a big part of the reason this is a nice place to live, with great schools, creative jobs, safe neighborhoods, and interesting culture. Thank you for being gay.
I ran a Google Scholar search that turned up a paper "Jerk Influence Coefficients, Through Screw Theory, of Closed Chains." The title is not a vulgar joke as each of the phrases is a term-of-art on the topic of rigid-body (yes, another domain-specific term) mechanics.
Let's just say Google served me a large number of adds on the assumption that I belong to what is only a narrow subculture of a broader and more diverse community.
Quibbling bullshit like you just engaged in is why regular people settle for a guy like Trump who calls you on your bullshit language soup. (Trump isn't much better, if at all, but people want a way to respond to the psuedo-intellectual drivel you promulgate.)
Simply put: quit being such a fucking prat. I know it's difficult, but 'clever' will be the death of you.
I would suggest a non-trivial subset of the training dataset encountered words like "homo" and "gay" in negative, colloquial contexts and likely couldn't discern the idiomatic usage. For example, if gaming chat windows provided any input for the training set, it wouldn't be unreasonable to see something like "stop spawn-camping you fucking fag" and the like wend its way into the dataset.
The sentiment analyzer reflects how average people use language, so the perception of the sentiment analyzer will be through that average user's use of language. If the average person is a bigoted idiot, the sentiment analyzer's interpretations will be those of a bigoted idiot.