| >> Of course, this is a high-level description and the actual process involves a lot of complex mathematics and computation. But I hope it gives you a better sense of the mechanisms behind these models. For the record, I just polished off a PhD in AI (symbolic machine learning) after a Master's where I studied neural nets and NLP, including plenty of language generation. You're teaching your grandma to suck eggs. And I'm really very tired with this kind of conversation that never teaches me anything new. Your comment is still "what"'s all the way down. You never explain why or how word embeddings capture aspects of meaning, you 're just repeating the claims by Mikolov or whoever. Look, here: >> Through this training process, the model learns to represent words and phrases as high-dimensional vectors, also known as embeddings. These embeddings capture many aspects of the words' meanings, including their syntactic roles and their semantic similarities to other words. That's just a claim, made long ago, and challenged at the time, and the challenge ignored, and it keeps being bandied about as some kind of scientific truth just because critics got tired or bored having their criticims consistently ignored and gave up trying. This is what I point out above: connectionists never stop to consider criticism of the limitations of their systems' until someone rubs their face in it - like Minsky and Pappert did in 1969, which then caused them to be forever reviled and accused of causing an AI winter, when what they really caused was some connectionists to get off their butts and try to improve their work, a process without which we wouldn't, today, have backpropagation applied to NNs, and the potent image classifiers, good models of text, etc, that it enabled. As to the "evidence" you profer, mainly preprints on arxiv, and mainly consisting of budding researchers uploading papers consisting of little more than leaderboards (those little tables with the systems on one side, the datasets on the other side, and your system's results in bold, or no paper) those are useless. 99% of research output in deep learning and neural nets is completely useless and never goes anywhere- because it lacks novelty, it is completely devoid of any theoretical results, and it is unreproducible even when the code is available. For example, you mention studies on "question answering". Ca. 2018 Google published a paper where they reported that their BERT language model scored near-human performance on some question answering dataset without ever even having been trained on question answering. A scientific miracle! Some boffins who clearly don't believe in miracles wondered why that would even be possible and dug a bit, and found that BERT was overfitting to surface statisical regularities of its dataset. They created a new test dataset devoid of such statistical regularities and BERT's performance went down the drain, until it hit rock bottom (a.k.a. "no better than chance"). So much for "semantic similarity" measured over word embeddings modelling meaning. But this is exactly the kind of work that I say connectionists consistently ignore: nowhere will you find that subsequent language models were tested in the same way. You will instead find plenty of tests "demonstrating" the ability of language models to represent semantics, meaning, etc. It's all bullshit, self-delusion at best, conscious fabrications otherwise. This is the paper (I'm not affiliated with it in any way): Probing Neural Network Comprehension of Natural Language Arguments https://aclanthology.org/P19-1459/ But this kind of work is thankless for the undertaking academics and most of us have more important things to do. So the criticism eventually dwindles and what remains is the bullshit, and the fabrications, and the fantasies, seeping into mainstream discourse and being repeated uncritically - by yourself, for example. I can't even summon the compassion to not blame you anymore. For all I know you're exactly one of those connectionists who don't even understand their work is not science anymore, but spectacle. P.S. I am not blind to the change of tone in your recent comments and I'm really sorry to be so cranky in response, when I should be cordial in reciprocity, but I've really had enough of all this. Unscientific bullshit has permeated everything and oozed everywhere. Perhaps it's time for me to take a break from HN, because it really doesn't look like I can have an original, curious conversation on here anymore. |
Semantics in word embeddings: While I agree that word embeddings cannot fully capture human-like semantic understanding, they do provide a mathematical representation that has proven useful in many NLP tasks. It's not that word embeddings "understand" semantics in the human sense, but they do capture certain aspects of meaning that are statistically derived from their use in the training corpus. This is not an unsubstantiated claim. It is empirically demonstrated in numerous tasks where semantic understanding is beneficial, like semantic similarity, word analogy, and other downstream tasks such as translation, sentiment analysis, text classification, etc.
Your point about BERT overfitting to statistical regularities of the dataset is well taken. Indeed, it exposes the limitations of the model and the need for careful design and evaluation of benchmarks. However, it's worth noting that a failure in one specific test doesn't invalidate the successes in other tasks. It simply highlights an area that needs improvement.
It's true that there's a flood of papers and not all of them have substantial novelty or impact. This is not a problem exclusive to deep learning or AI, but a broader issue in academia and scientific publishing. However, amidst the noise, there's also a lot of valuable work being done, with genuine advancements and novel approaches.
You mentioned that connectionists only improve their systems when someone rubs their face in it. This is essentially how scientific progress happens - through skepticism, criticism, and the relentless pursuit of truth. I would argue that the current era of deep learning research is no different. It's a messy, iterative process, with steps forward, backward, and sideways.
Furthermore, I believe it's crucial to remember that there's room for both connectionist and symbolic approaches in AI. It's not necessarily a matter of one being 'right' and the other 'wrong.' Rather, they offer different perspectives and techniques that can be valuable in different contexts. Connectionist models, like the neural networks we've been discussing, are incredibly effective at tasks like pattern recognition and prediction, especially when dealing with large, high-dimensional datasets. On the other hand, symbolic models are excellent at representing explicit knowledge and reasoning logically, making them useful for tasks that require a high degree of interpretability or strict adherence to predefined rules. The future of AI likely involves finding ways to integrate these two approaches, leveraging the strengths of each to overcome their respective limitations. The field is vast and diverse, and there's plenty of room for different methods and viewpoints.
PS: I understand where you're coming from. Sometimes I need a break from this too. Remember there is no malicious intent here when people are just sharing their views.