Ontological Insights in Language Understanding

#machinelearning

This week Dr. Tim Scarfe, Dr. Keith Duggar and Yannic Kilcher speak with veteran NLU expert Dr. Walid Saba. 

Walid is an old-school AI expert. He is a polymath, a neuroscientist, psychologist, linguist,  philosopher, statistician, and logician. He thinks the missing information problem and lack of a typed ontology is the key issue with NLU, not sample efficiency or generalisation. He is a big critic of the deep learning movement and BERTology. We also cover GPT-3 in some detail in today's session, covering Luciano Floridi's recent article "GPT‑3: Its Nature, Scope, Limits, and Consequences" and a commentary on the incredible power of GPT-3 to perform tasks with just a few examples including the Yann LeCun commentary on Facebook and Hackernews. 

Time stamps on the YouTube version

0:00:00 Walid intro 

00:05:03 Knowledge acquisition bottleneck 

00:06:11 Language is ambiguous 

00:07:41 Language is not learned 

00:08:32 Language is a formal language 

00:08:55 Learning from data doesn’t work  

00:14:01 Intelligence 

00:15:07 Lack of domain knowledge these days 

00:16:37 Yannic Kilcher thuglife comment 

00:17:57 Deep learning assault 

00:20:07 The way we evaluate language models is flawed 

00:20:47 Humans do type checking 

00:23:02 Ontologic 

00:25:48 Comments On GPT3 

00:30:54 Yann lecun and reddit 

00:33:57 Minds and machines - Luciano 

00:35:55 Main show introduction 

00:39:02 Walid introduces himself 

00:40:20 science advances one funeral at a time 

00:44:58 Deep learning obsession syndrome and inception 

00:46:14 BERTology / empirical methods are not NLU 

00:49:55 Pattern recognition vs domain reasoning, is the knowledge in the data 

00:56:04 Natural language understanding is about decoding and not compression, it's not learnable. 

01:01:46 Intelligence is about not needing infinite amounts of time 

01:04:23 We need an explicit ontological structure to understand anything 

01:06:40 Ontological concepts 

01:09:38 Word embeddings 

01:12:20 There is power in structure 

01:15:16 Language models are not trained on pronoun disambiguation and resolving scopes 

01:17:33 The information is not in the data 

01:19:03 Can we generate these rules on the fly? Rules or data? 

01:20:39 The missing data problem is key 

01:21:19 Problem with empirical methods and lecunn reference 

01:22:45 Comparison with meatspace (brains) 

01:28:16 The knowledge graph game, is knowledge constructed or discovered 

01:29:41 How small can this ontology of the world be? 

01:33:08 Walids taxonomy of understanding 

01:38:49 The trend seems to be, less rules is better not the othe way around? 

01:40:30 Testing the latest NLP models with entailment 

01:42:25 Problems with the way we evaluate NLP 

01:44:10 Winograd Schema challenge 

01:45:56 All you need to know now is how to build neural networks, lack of rigour in ML research 

01:50:47 Is everything learnable 

01:53:02  How should we elevate language systems? 

01:54:04 10 big problems in language (missing information) 

01:55:59 Multiple inheritance is wrong 

01:58:19 Language is ambiguous 

02:01:14 How big would our world ontology need to be? 

02:05:49 How to learn more about NLU 

02:09:10 AlphaGo 

Walid's blog: https://medium.com/@ontologik

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/walidsaba/