Understanding Deep Text, Facebook’s text understanding engine
“One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I don't know.”
That Groucho Marx quote illustrates why it’s difficult for computers to understand humans. When programming for computers to understand humans, one must account for vagueness, ambiguity and uncertainty to distil the meaning of human language.
Facebook announced today that it can now do that with Deep Text, a deep learning-based text-understanding engine running a neural network that can understand with near-human accuracy the textual content of several thousands of posts per second—and in more than 20 languages.
Consumers interacting with computers
Consumers regularly interact with computers trained with machine-learning techniques that understand human language. Ask Siri for the best Japanese restaurant in San Francisco, and Siri will give you a list of restaurants. Or ask Google how many people live in Lisle, Illinois, and Google will reply with the answer from the U.S. census. These intelligent systems parse the question like school children, using syntax to diagram a sentence and then answer the question with structured data sets: the list of restaurants labeled San Francisco and Japanese or the quantity of people labeled Lisle, IL, in the census database.
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