[OPLIN 4cast] OPLIN 4cast #489: AI is getting warmer

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OPLIN 4cast #489: AI is getting warmer
May 11th, 2016

[image: romance novel] OK, all you librarians, it's time to be brutally
honest: You don't really have a very high opinion of romance novels, do
you? At best, you think they're good escapism material that does no harm.
At worst, you shelve a few somewhere in your library where you think nobody
will ever see them. And it's true that no romance novel is likely to win
the Nobel Prize in Literature. But regardless of what we may think about
romance novels, Google has decided they're great training material for
artificial intelligence (AI) software.
- Google is feeding romance novels to its artificial intelligence engine to
make its products more conversational
<https://www.buzzfeed.com/alexkantrowitz/googles-artificial-intelligence-engine-reads-romance-novels>
(BuzzFeedNews | Alex Kantrowitz) "Romance novels make great training
material for AI because they all essentially use the same plot to tell
similar stories with different words. 'Girl falls in love with boy, boy
falls in love with a different girl. Romance tragedy,' [Google software
engineer Andrew] Dai said. By reading thousands of such books, the AI can
detect which sentences contain similar meanings and gain a more nuanced
understanding of language. Romance novels work better than children's
learn-to-read books, since they offer a broad range of linguistic examples
for the AI to draw from."
- Google's AI engine is reading 2,865 romance novels to be more
conversational
<http://www.theverge.com/2016/5/5/11599068/google-ai-engine-bot-romance-novels>
(The Verge | Lindsey J. Smith) "Jason Freidenfelds, a senior communications
manager at Google, told *The Verge* that currently the Google app only has
the capability to learn and understand basic questions. If you ask it,
'When was the Eiffel Tower built?' it can tell you. And if you follow that
with, 'Who built it?' the bot will understand that 'it' means 'the Eiffel
Tower.' However, it lacks the ability to have more natural conversations.
Dai noted in his email that 'we're getting good at understanding sentiment
and understanding whether a person likes something by how they describe
it,' but that bots aren't able to understand more subtle things, like
sarcasm."
- Google is making its AI binge-read thousands of romance novels to get a
little warmer
<http://www.sciencealert.com/google-is-making-its-ai-binge-read-thousands-of-romance-novels-to-get-a-little-warmer>
(Science Alert | Peter Dockrill) "They've reportedly trained the engine to
write sentences that resemble the kind of language you'd find in romance
novels, and the next step is to try to use its new diction in Google
products. One such product could be the Google app - the mobile app version
of Google Search on the desktop, but packed with assistant-like features
and voice control - and another could be the company's 'Smart Reply'
feature for Google Inbox, which could deliver more intelligent automatic
responses to messages thanks to its new and improved English skills."
- Google's AI is learning conversation from romance novels
<http://www.socialsongbird.com/2016/05/googles-ai-is-learning-conversation.html>
(Social Songbird | Rosina Brooker) "The next step for Google will be to
take this language improvement to their Google app and Smart Reply feature.
Their Smart Reply feature looks at blocks of text within emails and then
suggests a reply. Most suggested replies or message templates tend to be
quite bland or just straight to the point. With this AI the suggested
responses can be more conversational, which is more practical for the 10%
of users who use smart replies."

*Articles from Ohio Web Library <http://ohioweblibrary.org>:*

   - Talking to machines.
   <http://search.ebscohost.com.proxy.oplin.org/login.aspx?direct=true&db=buh&AN=74716917>
   (*Communications of the ACM*, April 2012, p.14-16 | Tom Geller)
   - Teaching machines to understand us.
   <http://search.ebscohost.com.proxy.oplin.org/login.aspx?direct=true&db=buh&AN=109424746>
   (*MIT Technology Review*, Sept./Oct. 2015, p.70-77 | Tom Simonite)
   - Gen-Meta: Generating metaphors by combining AI and corpus-based
   modeling.
   <http://search.ebscohost.com.proxy.oplin.org/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=112564985>
   (*Web Intelligence*, 2015, p.103-114 | Andrew Gargett and John Barnden)

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