Gretchen: I’ve got the blogpost up about the ice cream flavours from the middle school students, and some of them are really good. There are these whimsical flavours like “It’s Sunday” and “Cherry Poet” and “Brittle Cheesecake” and “Honey Vanilla Happy.” These seem like kind of reasonable ice cream flavours, right? Lauren: I’d be open to ordering a “Vanilla Nettle.” Gretchen: “Cherry Cherry Cherry.” If you like cherries, this is the flavour for you. There are also some weirder flavours from this data set like, “Chocolate Finger” and “Caramel Book” and – Lauren: “Washing Chocolate.” Gretchen: “Texas Charlie Covered Stunt.” Then, there’s this even weirder category, “Nuts with Mattery,” “Brown Crunch,” “Cookies and Green.” Lauren: Aww, so close, and yet… Gretchen: “Mango Cats.” Lauren: They’re weird to us because of the semantics of them – just to be linguist-y and spoil the moment for a second – but they still are English words, or they look like something we’d recognise as English words, even though I don’t think “mattery” is a word that I know of. I think it’s worth saying artificial intelligence doesn’t know what ice cream is, right, it’s just using this list of flavours to figure out what kind of patterns could fit into that list. Janelle: Exactly. It’s doing it at a very basic level. Like, what kinds of letters tend to come after other letters? What letters are we often finding in combination? Which letters are we never finding in combination? It’ll learn frequent words like “chocolate” or something. It’ll learn how to spell that after some false starts during training, but, yeah, without any concept of what chocolate is. Gretchen: If it ends up with something like “Vervette’s Caramel Borfle,” it learned “caramel” but who “Vervette” and “borfle” are, I don’t know. That’s just randomly combining some letters in ways that are probable as English words. Janelle: Yeah, it’s like a kid who learns how to write and immediately starts putting down letters on paper like, “Is this a word? Is this a word? How do you pronounce this?”
Excerpt from Episode 40 of Lingthusiasm: Making machines learn language - Interview with Janelle Shane
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