Recent trends in my field of research, syntactic parsing

We've been trying for a long time to make computers speak and listen. Here is what has been happening with the part I work on for the last few years, or at least the part I'm excited about.

What makes understanding hard is that what you are trying to understand can mean so many different things. SO many different things. More than you think!! In fact the number grows way out of line with the number of words.

Until a few years ago, the number one idea we had was to figure out how to put together just a few words at a time. The key was not to think about too many words at once. If you do that, you can make lots of little groups, and put them together. You start at the words. You put together a few words, and get a longer bit back. Then you put together two longer bits. You work your way up, making a tree. I'll draw you a little tree.

( ( The old ) (voice ( their troubles ) ) )

If the computer has that tree, you can ask it "Who were the troubles voiced by?", and it can tell you "the old". Course, it doesn't know what "the old" are. That's just some marks to it. But it gets how to put the words together, and give back other marks that are right.

Until the last few years, we thought it was a big deal to see the whole tree before you cut out any others for sure.

Now another way's shown up. And I think the facts are almost in. I'm definitely calling it early here, probably most don't agree!!

The other way is to work your way along, from left to right. The funny thing is, that's what we do! But it's taken a while for us to get our heads around how to make it work for a computer. But now, I think we've made it better than the other way. It makes the computer right when it guesses just as much, but it's much much faster.

The problem was, if you work your way along, left to right, it's hard to be sure your guess is the best guess for the words all put together, if you can't go back and change your mind. And the computer gets lots wrong. If you let it just run, it gets something wrong, but has to move forward, and the idea it's trying to build doesn't make sense. You get to "the old voice", and your tree is the one for "the voice that is old", not "voicing is what the old are doing". And then you're stuck.

People really thought that was it for that approach. If you couldn't sort your guesses about the whole thing, how could you know you didn't just close your mind too early? People found nice ways to promise that you would see every total idea at the end, so you could pick one then.

The problem is, you see every idea, but you can only ask questions about the way small groups of words were put together, when that idea was put together. You know how I said you'd build a tree? You could only ask questions about bits next to each other.

The other way, you're building this tree as you go along, left to right. As every word comes in, you add it to your tree. So yeah okay, we do have to make our guesses, and live with them. We don't see all the different possible trees at the end. We do get locked in. But all you have to do is not get locked in totally. Keep some other trees around. It turns out we need to keep thinking about 30-60 trees. Less if we're a bit bright about it.

We've been doing good stuff this way. I write this kind of thing. My one makes the computer guess where over 9 words in 10 are in the tree, and it can do ten hundred words in a blink. It's pretty cool. That's over a hundred times faster than we could do 3 to 5 years ago.

(Upvoted.) I've been reading Tyler and I read McAfee. So far, your comment here is the most impressive argument for this position I've seen anywhere, and so I don't feel bad about not addressing it earlier. I'm not sure you really address the central point either; why can't the disemployed people find new jobs like in the last four centuries, and why did unemployment drop in Germany once they fixed their labor market, and why hasn't employment dropped in Australia, etcetera? (And note that anything along the lines of 'regional boom' contradicts ZMP and completely outcompeted humans and other explanations which postulate unemployability, not 'unemployable unless regional boom'.) Why is the IQ 70 kid not able to do laundry as so many others once did earlier, if the economy is so productive - shouldn't someone be able to hire him in his area of Ricardian comparative advantage? Maybe eventually AI will disemploy that kid but right now humans are still doing laundry! Again, the economy of 1920 seemed to do quite well handling disemployment pressures like this with reemployment, so what changed?

Quick question: To what extent are you playing Devil's Advocate above and to what extent do you actually think that the robotic disemployment thesis is correct, a primary cause of current unemployment, not solvable with NGDP level targeting, and unfixable due to some humans being too-much-outcompeted, rather than due to other environmental changes like the regulatory environment etcetera?

I wouldn't say I literally hear the voice; I can easily distinguish it from sounds I'm actually hearing. But the experience is definitely auditory, at least some of the time; I could tell you whether the voice is male or female, what accent they're speaking in (usually my own), how high or low the voice is, and so on.

I definitely also have non-auditory thoughts as well. Sometimes they're visual, sometimes they're spatial, and sometimes they don't seem to have any sensory-like component at all. (For what it's worth, visual and spatial thoughts are essential to the way I think about math.)

..because it makes you try to see reality as it is?

In me, it's also had the effect of reducing empathy. (Helps me not go crazy.)

Rational distress-minimizers would behave differently from rational atruists. (Real people are somewhere in the middle and seem to tend toward greater altruism and less distress-minimization when taught 'rationality' by altruists.)

You only need an emergency fund if you do not have access to credit at reasonable terms. Investments you don't touch outside of emergencies coupled with open lines of credit should outperform excessive "emergency" savings. After all, lines of credit are typically free when you don't use or need them, while not getting the best rate of return on your savings isn't.

EDIT: I was reminded of a relevant saying: If you’ve never missed a flight, you’re spending too much time in airports.. Similarly, if you never have to borrow money for emergencies, your investments are too liquid.

This is a nice Bayes learning opportunity. It's reasonable to infer that a female-looking username makes someone more likely to be female, maybe twice as likely (not much more than that; this is the internet and people give themselves weird usernames all the time, and actual women may avoid using female-looking usernames in male-dominated forums to avoid drawing attention to their gender). However, the base rate of transsexualism, even within a community as unusual as LW, is still incredibly low and requires a lot of evidence to overcome (e.g. someone telling you they're transsexual).

You thought his username gave you over 13 bits of evidence?

I'm pretty sure he meant "19 yo as of tomorrow" and not "male as of tomorrow", though I did consider teasing him about that (which may be what you are doing! Those things can be hard to tell online).

Improving my social skills is going to be my number one priority for a while. I don't see this subject discussed too much on LW, which is strange because it's one of the biggest correlates with happiness and I think we could benefit a lot from a rational discussion in this area. So I was wondering if anyone has any ideas, musings, relevant links, recommendations, etc. that could be useful for this. Stuff that breaks from the traditional narrative of "just be nicer and more confident" is particularly appreciated. (Unless maybe that is all it takes.)

Optional background regarding my personal situation: I am a 19 yo male (as of tomorrow) who is going to enter college in the fall. I'm not atrociously socially inadept, e.g. I can carry on conversations, can be very bold and confident in short bursts sometimes, I have some friends, I've had girlfriends in the past. However, I also find it very hard to make close friends that I can hang out with one on one, I sometimes find myself feeling like I'm taking a very submissive role socially, and I feel nervous or "in my head" a lot in social interactions, among other things. Not to be melodramatic, but I find myself wishing a decent amount that I had more friends and was more popular.