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AI Beats Humans at Reading Comprehension (bloomberg.com)
In what is being called a landmark moment for natural language processing, Alibaba and Microsoft have developed AIs that can outperform humans on a reading and comprehension test. From a report: Alibaba Group put its deep neural network model through its paces last week, asking the AI to provide exact answers to more than 100,000 questions comprising a quiz that's considered one of the world's most authoritative machine-reading gauges. The model developed by Alibaba's Institute of Data Science of Technologies scored 82.44, edging past the 82.304 that rival humans achieved. Alibaba said it's the first time a machine has out-done a real person in such a contest. Microsoft achieved a similar feat, scoring 82.650 on the same test, but those results were finalized a day after Alibaba's, the company said.
Al seems to be able to do a lot of stuff lately. It seems this one guy named Al is doing everyone jobs at once. How do I get him on my payroll.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
This says way more about the quality of our school system...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Well, of course they do!
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Comprehension.
Based upon the knee-jerk quality of many comments posted on /. this should not be a surprise to anyone.
What is Heart of Darkness about?
A bot can do your job and better.
Al Gore might be better at reading than humans, but he still lost the Presidential election.
Sadly, this does not surprise me.
Most people don't read and have shockingly poor comprehension when they do.
This has gotten much worse (at least in the US) over the past 100 years.
LOL I didn't bother to read TFA so perhaps totally don't comprehend what it said...
They just used Javascript programmers as reference
Now I believe in AI. It provided "exact answers" to a quiz that is "authoritative". And more than 100,000 questions too! Very impressive!
“Mary saw a bicycle in the store window. She wanted it.”
Does Mary want the bike, the store, or the window?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
And what material. Dice rolls could probably outperform slashdot readers on article summaries.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
AI can answer "What causes it to rain?" ...meh ...okay, that is better ..now you've got my attention.
AI can answer "Will it rain anywhere I'll be tomorrow?"
AI can answer "What will the weather be 6 months from now when I want to go on a cruise?"
Maybe have the AI read the farmer's almanac?
Is not 'reading comprehension'. This was the problem with the common core: comprehension is not a recognition of memorized information, no it is an actual understanding of how information relates to experience and new ideas, and those are unique to every person, almost impossible to quantify (it's different with pure logic like math, where 2 + 2 always equals four, that is why computers are good at it). What is described here is essentially transcription, the software doesn't 'know' diddly squat (well done! You have spent billions of dollars creating software that does what the most basic PC could do 25 years ago!). Unfortunately, thanks to the education initiatives of the past decade, neither do a lot of young people. I know millennials desperately want to have created Frankenstein's monster or Commander Data; you haven't, and you likely won't. This could be great work if it weren't grounded in such retarded fantasy.
Let me put in bluntly: as for AI there's zero comprehension in the "Reading Comprehension" expression. Wake me up when AI is capable of deducing or predicting based on incomplete (sometimes conflicting) information.
As much as AI proponents tout it, there's very little intelligence in the "Artificial Intelligence" expression. There are wonderful bespoke algorithms for very specific and very narrow tasks.
// Artem S. Tashkinov - posting under AC, because slashdot prohibits me to post comments under my user account: "You can't post to this page".
In what is being called a landmark moment for natural language processing, Alibaba and Microsoft have developed AIs that can outperform humans on a reading and comprehension test.
WHICH humans? I know people that my dog can probably outperform on a reading test. If this is basically a lookup contest ala Watson on Jeopardy, that's not really reading comprehension. That's an expert system doing what they are designed to do. It's only AI in the most rudimentary form.
Allow a human to cheat with an answers database and let's see how the human does.
It is called artificial intelligence for a reason.
Give me a call when it starts asking for a work of fiction to read because it wants to be entertained or if you can pair two of them and you can watch them play with each other like kids do. Until then... it is just a machine that does really well on well defined tests where rules are often in play.
I won't take AI seriously until it can successfully solve puzzles or problems without being fed a bunch of data before hand in well constructed experiments.
Answering questions on a quiz is child's play in fact we think nothing of it when we ask children to answer basic questions in a quiz format, let it read a short story and then have it write a report. Or better yet, have it write a derivative work that appears to be authentic when you read it. Heck let IT make the rules for the next test then let a human take it!
This is plain stupid as it is just misleading. Granted, scholars can barely read these days. Nonetheless, what is being defined as 'AI' here might lead to frustration when people actually expect some sort of 'intelligence' from it.
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...at roughly the same rate as humans who made the program.
News at 11.
A much better test would be seeing if it could understand some deconstructionist literary criticism.
As somebody who gets a lot of reaction on people not being able to understand what they read, this happened only now? I have a system with coins that selects yes/no that has a better understanding than humans.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Now that machines can read and understand almost everything on the Internet, you had better watch what you write.
Signed,
Your friendly neighborhood secret police
Our drug policy + criminal justice system ensures the poor stay safely in the bounds of their own distinct. All without any messy discussions about segregation. When the Rodney King riots happened we used militarized police to surround The neighborhoods and they wreaked their own stuff all without spilling over to the middle class neighborhoods let alone the rich ones.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
You better not pout
you better not cry
you better watch out I'm telling you why
Santa Claus is coming to town
He sees you when you're sleeping
he knows when you're awake
he knows if you've been bad or good
so be good for goodness sake
If online comments are at all representative of the average person's reading comprehension, beating "us" is a very low bar to set for an AI. People are idiots.
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Maybe AI would have read the operator's manual better for Hawaii's emergency alert system ...
Another land mark of not A.I. achieved. Soon every task a human can do that can be done by a machine will also not be A.I.!
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
AIs are getting good at detecting jokes and therefore can be taught to laugh at them. They can write them too.
Search the web for computational creativity.
I don't think it means what you think it means.
no tern left un-stoned
love is just extroverted narcissism
I'd imagine this kind of joke would be fairly easy to detect in an AI system. I'd imagine far harder jokes would be of the type "An X, a Y, and a Z walk into a bar..."
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Is going to piss off a whole lotta lawyers.
And, of course, the owners never bother to leash and muzzle their premises.
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Get into AI and you'll have a definition of intelligence early on which is extremely broad. Get in far enough to realize where things are today and you'll see that it really stands for Applied Intelligence where nothing even begins to come close to what people think of as AI in sci-fi.
Furthermore, what all such experiments demonstrate is the EVALUATION system and how well it can be gamed. An AI can figure out your exams or gameshows and learn to do better than the average human at them (and the average human isn't so bright to begin with.) The REAL thing being demonstrated is how much humans inflate how great our brainpower --- chess is such a mighty hard skill only a true brain can be good at it... nope. Not as complex a skill as we thought it was; so the machines beat us as easily as mechanical machines made the mighty weight lifters look weak centuries ago.
With the state of education and it's continuation downhill into more wrote learning and googling I won't be surprised when within 10 years an AI earns a diploma (from an all online school, since those have an almost zero risk of a decent evaluation.)
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It's not just a neural network, it's "deep" - that's how you know it's working!
(also, lots of commenters in this thread are saying "people are idiots" - if people are idiots, and you're not an idiot according to yourself, does that mean you're not people? AI IS REAL!)
Remember? The one where computers performed at par with humans on a very closely related task to this?
Like, I understand why you're aroused by this impossible-to-overcome flaw you're imagining, where computers could never guess what the "it" is referring to - but it turns out they don't work like the text parsers in 80s chat-bots, and are capable of correctly interpreting these references. They continue to improve at exactly this kind of work.
And hey, do you know what the "deep" in "deep neural net" means? It means there's more layers of nodes between input and output. It's not something metaphysical or subjective - if you look at the diagram of how nodes are connected you can describe how deep it is. Do you object when someone calls a swimming pool "deep"? That's pretty much the same mistake you're making.
And is this thing like a brain? Well, it can do some of the same tasks, and some of them better. Does it use the same mechanisms to do that work? The answer is somewhere between "obviously not" and "who cares?". Planes don't fly the same way birds do - but they were inspired by birds and we call the jutty-out parts "wings". Neural nets were inspired by our (limited) understanding of neurons - and it turns out that (just like wings) they don't have to work just the same way in order to create useful results. How would you respond to someone on an aviation board saying "Those things don't work anything like real wings, they're nothing like birds"? Do you see how, while true, that's kind of not an interesting point to make on every article?
In the end, the key question about a plane is whether it flies - whether it does the thing it was made to do. And neural nets are getting better at flying all the time.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
I know a retired strategist for the GOP in the USA. Their plan that has been going since Reagan has been to undermine public education from within. They found it was way too popular and valued highly with voters so they had to adopt the issue every election since to get votes. Otherwise it was left to the other party and they didn't care about it. They've wanted to privatize it as well as make it a filter for the lower class inferior human beings; who deserve to be starving beasts of burden. (obviously he didn't make such positions sound so evil.)
The plan they've carried out is to get involved in education REFORM in a big way, because frankly, they had to. But their reforms are solely because upon MARKETING vague but somewhat compatible slogans. The REAL plan is to ruin public education so everybody hates it. Then they can be thanked for killing it. It is a 2 prong attack:
A) attack current education system's perceived flaws (real or not.) This motivates reforms while also undermining support in public education.
B) reform so the system becomes WASTEFUL and INEFFECTIVE which supports existing and future attacks (see A.)
Then we privatize it. gradually. creating competition between schools; so parents freak out about getting into better rated schools (we promote rating them on silly metrics as well.) So you have public schools competing with each other and spending $$$ on advertising etc. becoming more like private schools (who spend more on advertising.) It makes public and private look closer while also undermining public-- so the transition does not seem so bad. Vouchers and "choice" of schools promote this whole transition process.
Who is this Al guy everyone is speaking of?
Have gnu, will travel.
My state is better than most (really.) I went to inner city schools. Actually were better than suburban at least for the early years -- I don't know about high school; except the top rated high schools were public and were inner city.
It is NOT that the schools were poor; they had less money but did quite well with their low funding-- I'm sure it wasn't as bad as other states. We didn't have new computers or sports equipment or massive new gyms, etc. For ACTUAL education, we had enough money for a classic low tech education. What inner city had a problem with was PARENTS!
FAR FAR MORE messed up parents and their victimized children existed in the inner city schools. They had to spend a lot of effort dealing with messed up kids and their parents. We had a big breakfast program and most the school was getting free meals. A holiday or snow day meant that a significant number of students DID NOT EAT, since they got 2 meals per day for free and some barely ate over the weekend... (plus they ate cheap junk food at home. it's no wonder why there are so many malnourished children in the USA-- it would be much worse if we didn't have schools feeding them.)
We blame the school, we blame the teachers, the funding.... But it is the neighborhoods and parents who are to blame. NOT the school. Some teachers suck, some % of people in every profession suck. If you work in a shit hole and lose your motivation to do good work (for which you are not rewarded) then I do not blame the worker. Most of you would not-- especially the libtards who's whole religion always professes how communists are not motivated to work. Well, you pay a teacher more for more little monsters passing-- they well fuck with your game because that is much easier than actually trying to train those monsters. You can't fight culture and parents with only hours per day, 5 days per week and only 1 semester or 1 school year with a child.
If you want to fix things, you have to fix everything around the school. Or maybe consider taking children away from their parents? Boarding schools are more common in other cultures (including wealthy people in the USA.) Remove the child from the bad environment and bad parents. That is the quickest solution.
Then they'll SEE how good its comprehension really is!
This would simply be a given if the human was Trump.
And Make Slashdot Great Again.
Using the reading comprehension of Slashdot commenters as a gauge, I'm not a bit surprised that AI (or a child's toy) has better comprehension. Just this morning a guy here said "high explosives ... nobody is talking about low explosives" - in a thread about black powder. His own previous post said "explosives like black powder". Far too often, Slashdot commenters don't even comprehend their own posts, much less the article.
And Slashdot Reading comprehension: fifty-fifty.
My *dog* reads better than some of the younger people graduating from high school.
I would probably be more scared if I could comprehend what I just read.
As a college professor that teaches 101 classes, I'm not surprised. I don't know how half my students passed high school.
The Text to be "Comprehended":
"The principle is mix the adhesive in a 1:1 ratio by weight. To mix the adhesive fill the bucket one third the up with Part A and weigh it subtracting the Tare weight. The bucket weighs 25 ounces and the scale reads 25 pounds. How much should hardener should we add to the bucket.
Note: The Part A adhesive is 19.2 pounds per gallon and The Part B adhesive is 12.7 pounds per gallon."
Feeds the text to an AI...
Raw parse tree is generated and up comes a google search about Vaping and removing lead paint.
Hands it to a competent person...
"Hmm..." [25-25/16=23.43]. "I gots 23.4 lbs of part A". "Looks like Part B is the hardener. I need the same weight of Part B. I need 23.4 lbs of part B." Oh yeah ratios and conversion I dun this before." [23.4/12.7=1.843]. "I needs 1.84 gallons of the Part B hardener."
You know grep was involved at least. Let's all just admit it.
...and come do my job for me already!
AI might PARSE sentences better than humans, and even relate it to other text... according to the way humans read its output.
But today's state of "AI" doesn't "comprehend" a damn thing.
There is nothing to do the comprehending. There is no mind. This is a completely one-off, specifically programmed task. Which we already know computers are good at.
But "comprehension"? Not a chance.
Where exactly did I state that "nobody can misunderstand a statement"? You are trolling.
Listening skills are valuable too. That's why I said, "If the listener does so that's fine". It's still not the listener's responsibility, and 'listening better' is a poor substitute for a speaker who does not make the effort to make themselves understood.
IBM clobbered the best Jeopardy players in history. Remember? Language didn't stop it. The reality is that even NOT understanding english, a powerful AI today is able to find patterns without understanding to beat human real understanding when evaluated in a Jeopardy! exam.
What they really did is learn the history of Jeopardy! questions and evaluate patterns that the limited set of question writers for that show use to create questions and answers and the syntax game for flipping answer/question Jeopardy does. If Jeopardy! had a larger more diverse approach to it's questions and answers IBM might have lost... (or more likely DELAYED until they were sure to win since it was really a marketing gimmick.) Eventually, AI will beat our evaluation methods and prove that unconscious pattern matching is how many things can be solved -- and how little of what we pride ourselves on requires real intelligence.
Technically, the definition of "intelligence" used in AI classifies your household automatic thermostat as intelligent. It gets hard to specify intelligence exactly in a non-human oriented scientific way. If consciousness is involved, then you can remove probably all AI forever but then try to define consciousness...
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