Comments on: Powerset Parses Miss South Carolina

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By: GaryB

GaryB — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 22:34:39 +0000

The answer to “who” do you think the American’s are who can’t find their arse on a map is: “People like George Bush”.

By: Ashley

Ashley — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 16:40:40 +0000

alright when i heard then i was kind of shocked in a way. it is a question that no one can really answer, but more of a ‘what do you think’ question. i give her kudos for trying to be creative with it. obviously the contestants were nervous so honestly how can you blame her? there are much more things we could be making fun of so why pick on HER? some of you guys are saying, “wow, how stupid is she! what in the world is going on in her head.” it’s NOT stupidity, it’s nervousness. GET OVER IT. we all say things we look back on and go, “damn what was THAT?”

for real, there are better things to make fun of.

By: Damian

Damian — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 14:14:39 +0000

I remember watching a clip of French “Who wants to be a millionaire” - the question was which of the following rotates around the earth - the moon, the sun and a couple of other. The guy answering the question wasn’t sure (unbelievable in itself), and then he asked the audience, of which 50% thought the sun rotated around the earth.

Stupidity is, apparently, a worldwide phenomenon. Just rent the movie “Idiocracy” and you’ll see where we’re going.

By: Leonoor

Leonoor — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 09:14:13 +0000

The answer provided by Powerset may be somewhat funny, but it’s incorrect. Miss South Carolina tells us “our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S., uh, should help South Africa and should help Iraq and the Asian countries”. I agree with gilltots that this does not answer the query “Who does education help?”. It _does_ answer the question “Who should our education help?” (according to Miss S Carolina), but the correct answer to that question would be “the US, South Africa, Iraq and the Asian countries”.

So all this example illustrates is the limitations of Powerset’s language technology given very noisy input.

By: Culp

Culp — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 07:56:59 +0000

That should be whom does American education help

By: Pidge

Pidge — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 07:41:56 +0000

@ Andy C

Just how is

‘because 94% of American’s can’t locate Europe on a map’

the correct answer to this question?

By: jyangster

jyangster — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 04:09:28 +0000

Iwonder who is harder to undersand - Miss Carolina or the Powerset guys when they explain why their technology is a Google Killer. I think the most cogent Powerset guy ever was the drunk one on the Venture beat video.

By: Pete

Pete — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 03:47:01 +0000

The powerset demo is fun, but I question it’s usefulness in regards to search on the web. Her speech, for better or worse, was Natural Language. They parsed the sentence, after they transcribed it, but my first question: what’s up with all the hyphens? When people speak, the words oftenrunintoeachother. We don’t pause between words. When transcribing we tokenize, as they did, but on the web hyphens may mean concatenation. Or when I stutter, am I spitting out hyphens I’m unaware of? And how did that affect their parse? Second, what about newspaper english, it’s not the same as the way humans talk; I’m saying the language of content of articles posted on the web will differ from the way people naturally speak. (like how I ran all the words together above as an example) What about something like call center or customer service records? Where for sake of time employees will type messages often with only noun-adjective combinations (no verbs) and no punctuation, and sometimes, for the sake of brevity, no vowels? If everyone spoke like Miss South Carolina, or posted their web-content in a similar voice, well, there are several companies that would consider themselves fortunate besides powerset. But I guess that’s why they haven’t released anything but blog posts. They did do a great job of capitalizing on the moment though.

By: Find A Path » A semantic search engine to sort out Miss South Carolina’s mind

Mon, 03 Sep 2007 20:34:53 +0000

[...] Having studied linguistics, I just can’t help but laugh at, and admire, that the semantic search engine Powerset tried to parse Miss South Carolina’s answer to a tv interview. Their result could be impressive if not tweaked in any way - but I’d rather test the search engine when it’s live than comment further. Reported by TechCrunch. [...]

By: Jerome

Jerome — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 19:52:05 +0000

@Matt,

The Powerset engine was not asked the same question as the contestant. This was intentional.

By: Nemrut

Nemrut — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 19:49:33 +0000

lol..goes to show confidence doe not equal intelligence.

By: Jerome

Jerome — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 19:47:54 +0000

@Michael Geary,

Yes, I noticed my ‘misunderstanding’ typo after I posted it, but I figured it would be overkill to make a post pointing that out as people would have taken it as a typo since it was correctly spelled in the post above. (or not!)

By: Matt

Matt — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 19:36:47 +0000

The question was “Why do you think this is?” not who do think this is. Answer was still awful.

By: Michael Geary

Michael Geary — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 19:35:20 +0000

@Jerome: “… since this thread is so grammar focused I should probably revise that to say you *have* a missunderstanding of what happened.”

I’m glad this thread isn’t speling focused!

By: Steve Ballmer

Steve Ballmer — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 17:05:58 +0000

‘m serious, you see this is the result when you have a philosophy of making everything soooo simple and easy! The complex should have to be figured out you see, as a society we are not helping people when we “Apple” things. Why would a computer with an interface that a 6 year old can use be considered good for an 18 year old?
This problem goes deep, we at MS are determined to solve it!

By: Jerome

Jerome — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 16:45:23 +0000

@gilltots,

I agree with you if we are talking about asking a human, but we asked a *machine* and returning no result was probably not an option. If you look at the text semantically from a machine’s POV (or as I would programming a machine) then we do find something to latch onto:

“… our education over here in the U.S should help the U.S. …”

As long as Powerset’s engine can connects Americans as belonging to the U.S. then this jumble does hold an answer to the query “Who does education help?”

By: gilltots

gilltots — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 16:31:16 +0000

@Jerome,

i know powerset searched her answer. i’m saying *she* never answered the question “who does education help” - so for powerset to pull “Americans” out as an answer is not helpful - her answer doesn’t contain an answer for the search. Yes, “Americans” answers the “who?” part of the question but not the “helped by education” part - see what i’m sayin?

for example, if you asked a human to read her answer and tell you based on that response “who does education help?”, the correct answer would be:

“her response doesn’t mention who education helps. she says americans don’t have maps. nowhere does she mention who is helped by education. therefore i cannot answer your question based solely on her quote”

so the powerset result is irrelevant.

QED

By: Jerome

Jerome — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 16:23:23 +0000

… since this thread is so grammar focused I should probably revise that to say you *have* a missunderstanding of what happened.

By: Jerome

Jerome — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 16:17:25 +0000

@gilltots,

I believe you are misunderstanding what happened. Her *answer* was what Powerset searched. Given that, deriving that Americans are the ones her answer describes as helped by education is impressive.

By: Kelly

Kelly — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 15:59:06 +0000

It just proves she is a robot. Her answer sounds like the spam I get.

By: ben_mackerel

ben_mackerel — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 15:31:00 +0000

she knows she’s on earth, right!
she’s pretty, right!

the rest is just middle class snobbery.

By: gilltots

gilltots — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 15:21:58 +0000

this doesn’t seem that impressive to me.

when i use a search engine i want it to give me *relevant* results. her answer is completely *irrelevant* - not only does she not answer the question about why americans can’t find their own country on a map, but she most definitely does not answer the question “who does education help?” - so for powerset to find an answer to that question inside her response is pretty much less than useless to me - it seems like it’s just finding a “who” at random and disregarding the rest of the question.

that’s what i hate about google right now too - i do a search then have to manually filter out all the irrelevant crap to find something that’s actually relevant.

By: ihero

ihero — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 15:16:18 +0000

We are all just soooo perfect. Clearly this is a result of all the text messaging and social websites…….

Give the kid a break– Go Gamecocks !

By: Fabian Schonholz

Fabian Schonholz — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 14:59:35 +0000

I feel bad for Caitlin Upton.