ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

FEATS,
LIMITS, &
CAVEATS

Monojit Choudhury
Microsoft Research Lab India
@AIDevDays, 9th Mar 2018
monojitc@microsoft.com
The third wave of AI
Speech-2-Speech
Translation
Speech
Human Parity in

Deep Learning
Games
Human Parity in

Vision
AI: Hype or Reality?

Subbarao
Kambhampati:
Challenges of
Human-Aware
AI Systems
AAAI 2018
Presidential Address
 How long
will it take
for AI to
surpass
humans?

McKinsey Global institute analysis

Three Pressing Questions
LIMITS • What makes Natural Language, Social,
and Emotional Understanding hard
problems?
FEATS • Can Deep Learning (or any futuristic
technology) magically solve these
problems?
CAVEATS • Is it necessary to solve these problems
to make practically useful AI systems?
 Ludwig Wittgenstein
(1889-1951)

Unlike chess or black

gammon, the rules of
the LANGUAGE GAME
are defined and redefined by
the language users every time
a game is played.
It is not difficult to devise a paper machine which will play a
not very bad game of chess… Are there imaginable digital
computers which would do well in the imitation game?
Alan Turing, 1950

The biggest breakthrough in AI will be when computers

can read and understand information like humans do.
Bill Gates, 2017
 Artificial
Language
Understanding º General º AI-complete
Intelligence
 Language
Understanding
requires
Common Sense
• Linguistic Knowledge
– Words, idioms, proverbs, metaphors
• World Knowledge
• Contextual Knowledge
• Socio-cultural Norms
Two scientists walk into a bar.
"I'll have H2O," says the 1st.
"I'll have H2O, too," says the 2nd.

Bartender gives them water

because he is able to distinguish
the boundary tones that dictate
the grammatical function of
homonyms in coda position, as well as

pragmatic context.
Why is Pragmatics Important?
• Communicative intent
• Request, order, negotiation, persuasion,
threatening, inspiring, demotivating, …
• Social Functions
• Politeness, formality, socio-cultural conventions
• Non-literal Meanings
• Jokes, sarcasm, irony,
figurative language
• Resolving references
• Deixis, topic-focus
Language
usage
strongly
depends
on the
social
context
 Has/Will
Deep Learning
revolutionize
Language
Understanding?
• Neural Machine Translation Systems
are better than the Phrase-Based MT
Systems for some language pairs
– No gain for German-English
– Substantial gain for Japanese-English
 Has/Will • Neural Networks are universal
Deep Learning approximators, however, language is
revolutionize NOT a continuous function, it is a
Language Discrete Combinatorial System
Understanding?
• Two fundamental benefits of deep
learning to NLP:
– Modeling Infinite context à Long distance
dependencies
– Discrete to continuous mapping à
word2vec
 Word
Embeddings
“You shall know a word
by the company it
keeps.”
- Firth, 1957

Continuous Bag-of-Word
Skip grams
 However,
Deep learning Hard but tractable problems
cannot do • How to integrate external knowledge
Common sources?
Sense • How to store learnt information
Reasoning explicitly?
• How to reason over knowledge base
explicitly?
• How to acquire DATA for all these?
 A brief 1950s – 1980s: Rule based systems
Linguists ruled the world
history of
NLP 1990s – 2000s: Basic statistical learning
Linguistic insights with some data

2000s – 2010s: Large scale supervised

and semi-supervised learning
Linguistic Data Big data with some linguistic insight
insight
2010s - : Deep learning
ONLY DATA
 How much POS Tagging
(#annotated
Machine
Translation
Speech
Recognition

DATA? words) (#parallel

sentences)
(hours of
speech)
1950s-1980s As much as needed for linguistic analysis
Rule-based
Natural languages are fascinating.
Adj Noun Verb Adj
1990s-2000s 10k – 100k 10k-100k 10-100
Linguistic
Natural languages are fascinating. insights +
Statistical
自然语言是迷人的。 2000s – 2010s 100k – 100M 100k – 1M 1o-1000
Big data
2010s – 1M – 1B 1M – 1B 1000 – 10k
Deep
Learning

Na-tu-ral lan-gua-ges are fa-sci-na-ting

 All English
Chinese

languages

#Words (million) in LDC

Spanish Arabic

are equal,
but
some are
more equal
than others. Rank of Language

Amount of resources present for

various languages on LDC (2008)
Breaking the Zipfian Barrier of NLP.
Invited talk at IJCNLP 2008 Workshop
Even if we solve the problem
of language understanding
for a few languages by next 3
or 4 decades, it will take at
least a century for building
such technology for most of
the major languages of the
world, unless brain-reading
becomes a reality.
Or maybe most of the
minority languages will die
by then!
Three Pressing Questions
• What makes Natural Language, Social,
and Emotional Understanding hard
problems?

• Can Deep Learning (or any futuristic

technology) magically solve these
problems?
CAVEATS • Is it necessary to solve these problems
to make practically useful AI systems?
Challenges of Human-Aware AI Systems
Our Systems seem
happiest

Subbarao • Either far away from

Kambhampati: humans
AAAI 2018
Presidential Address
• Or in an adversarial
stance with humans
 AI is a tool.
Not the problem
• Human-aware AI
&
Almost never – AI should collaborate, not
compete with humans
the complete
– The strengths of the two are
solution complementary
– Users are usually cooperative –
leverage!
 AI is a tool.
Not the problem
& • Data is the new electricity
Almost never – Invest and innovate in
the complete collecting data
solution – Beware of privacy issues and
biases in data
– Contribute back
– Invest in low-resource
technology
 AI is a tool.
Not the problem
&
• Understand the problem, the
Almost never
users and the context
the complete
solution – Human-Computer Interaction
– Ethnography and Sociology
– Market Research
Code-mixing

• ni som har möjlighet att delta i missing people's sökande efter

snälla snälla gör det!!!!
• Adik… sem brape boleh bwak kenderaan? normal parent
question – UiTMLendufornia
• jit fi la fin du mois de decembre kan ljaw bared ktir wttalj

Code-Mixing or Code-Switching is mixing of more than one language

in a single conversation or utterance.
MULTILINGUAL
SOCIETIES
provide unique and
interesting challenges
• Code-switching
• Language preference
• Linguistic
Accommodation of
Language choice

50% of the world’s

population is multilingual
 Project Mélange
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/melange/

The Mélange Team: Kalika Bali, Monojit Choudhury, Sunayana Sitaram, Indrani Medhi Thies,
Anshul Bawa, Adithya Pratapa, Brij Srivastava
Past members: Ashutosh Baheti, Shruti Rijhwani, Royal Sequeira, Chandra Maddila and a
bunch of interns
 Thank you!
monojitc@microsoft.com