In a less than shining moment, Caitlin Upton, the 18 year old Miss South Carolina Teen, answered a fairly simple pagent question with a nonsensical answer:
Q: Recent polls have shown a fifth of Americans can’t locate the United States on a world map. Who do you think this is?
A: I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because, uh, some people out there in our nation don’t have maps and, uh, I believe that our, uh, education like such as in, uh, South Africa and, uh, the Iraq and everywhere like such as, and I believe that they should, uh, 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, so we will be able to build up our future for our children.
Not one to miss a PR opportunity, yet-to-launch natural language search engine Powerset took a shot at parsing her answer so that queries could be run against it. Based on the query “Who does education help?” the index returned the result “Americans.” That’s an impressive result, given the nature of the data being queried.
The test shows the potential usefulness of Powerset as a search engine. The query does not match the content based on a keyword match, and the answer can only be determined via a contextual analysis of the data.
Powerset tends to look very good in demos against a limited index, as the above example shows. but it still has to prove that it can index and analyze large chunks of the web to become a viable competitor to Google and other search engines. That’s going to be their biggest challenge (and cost). Powerset still has much to prove as they prepare to launch.
lol - you can tell right off the bat, that her answer will be ditzy. but i don’t blame her, she’s probably nervous - as well as all the other contestants.
mario lopez’s reaction says it all - he was practically cringing, and relieved it was over.
i still don’t see it though, this powerset thing working out.
Why not really launch? I wait too long.
http://www.customsearch.net
She isn’t really that thick. If she’d answered correctly; ‘because 94% of American’s can’t locate Europe on a map’, she wouldn’t be infamous for 15 seconds.
I saw an Australian show that they went to the US with maps that had the countries names in the wrong place - they asked where is Iraq, and pointed to the completely wrong country, wrong continent even. Amazing!
Andys answer is right on.
Hahaha, this is a classic post. Thanks Techcrunch.com
Talking about people who are ambitious, I ran into this guy who wants to make 10 million friends in 3 weeks.
http://tenmillionfriends.blogspot.com
Bill Maher had a great comparison of this clip with our prez answering a reporter’s question:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=oMzHq4qIS0I
It is what I have already posted on here once. As soon as you ask the majority of Americans something about another country than their own they are on thin ice. During a visit to the US I was asked by a University student, if we had cars in Europe
The video still brings a smile to my face though.
“Who do you think this is?”
Nonsensical answer to a nonsensical question, I’d say.
Ah, that one is too easy, linguistically speaking, isn’t it?
Who — Americans — noun, plural, uppercase. There are no other candidates for the match in that “sentence”. U.S. is uppercase, but it’s an initialism (funny, Firefox underlies this word, indicating a misspelling, which it is not), so it’s out. South Africa can easily be parsed as a “named entity”, a country. Similarly, Asia ends up being parsed as NE, a continent.
Oh, I see, the highlighted piece ends with “help”. Interesting, but note that a few words before the end of the highlight there is another instance of “help”. Maybe it should have ended there?
Eh, um, like, um, like — fun idea, Powerset, should help.
Here is a video of the crowning of Miss Teen USAA
Miss South Carolina was 3rd Runner Up - but is getting more publicity than Miss USA falling down. Believe it or not, Miss S Carolina has the 10th most popular video of ALL TIME on youtube in just ONE WEEK
http://digg.com/television/Mis.....the_Winner
because a fifth of americans are so self centred and dont realise that actually there are other countries are shown on the same map, so when seeing the whole map in its entirety they fail to spot where the shape of america is when mixed together with other shapes.
People always bitch about scaling and rarely will the problems really not be solvable. However with something like powerset one begins to wonder…
Best of luck though, there is plenty of room for improvement in search.
I wait too long.
I wait too long.
http://www.iTechArt.com
I feel bad for Caitlin Upton.
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 !
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.
she knows she’s on earth, right!
she’s pretty, right!
the rest is just middle class snobbery.
It just proves she is a robot. Her answer sounds like the spam I get.
@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.
… since this thread is so grammar focused I should probably revise that to say you *have* a missunderstanding of what happened.
@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
@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?”
‘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!
@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!
The question was “Why do you think this is?” not who do think this is. Answer was still awful.
@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!)
lol..goes to show confidence doe not equal intelligence.
@Matt,
The Powerset engine was not asked the same question as the contestant. This was intentional.
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.
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.
@ Andy C
Just how is
‘because 94% of American’s can’t locate Europe on a map’
the correct answer to this question?
That should be whom does American education help
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.
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.
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.
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”.