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Google has just put its AI language software called SyntaxNet in the open source section, a smart move that will not only benefit Google tremendously, but it will also help all the AI researchers working on this technology to push the market forward.
Only recently, Dag Kittlaus, co-founder of Siri, the infamous AI assistant, has presented a new digital assistant called Viv. Viv is an AI that promises cutting-edge technology able to understand more complex and natural aspects of language than the other AIs on the market now.
So how about it? Will the open sourced SyntaxNet news be a game changer for the not-yet-launched Kittlaus’s Viv?
SyntaxNet is known amongst natural language researchers as a “syntactic parser,” a processor that analyzes computer linguistics by using “deep neural networks” and tries to create a meaningful dialect.
The system combines punctuation, grammar logic and everything involved in speech – what is the subject, the object, a noun, a preposition, the verb and how they all relate – to try to figure out what a phrase might be about.
Fernando Pereira, Google’s Research Director, says SyntaxNet, the AI language software, has improved Google’s error rate up to 40% compared to previous software methods.
Researchers outside Google say SyntaxNet is probably the most advanced existing AI language software. Noah Smith, a University of Washington profession specialized in natural language understanding is surprised that Google is sharing so much of their tools, something they didn’t do as often in the past.
Many people are doing natural language research and with SyntaxNet’s availability, Smith says their work will be pushed “forward a little bit.”
Another tool open-sourced by Google was the TensorFlow, the software engine behind the whole Mountain View Company.
With these two incredibly huge implements in the open source environment, Google could have added brains working for the advancement of this technology and challenge even further the real AI conversation.
What Pereira says Google wants, is for people “to move beyond parsing, towards the deeper semantic reasoning that is necessary” and explore past parsing. They just gave parsing for free. But with people using language in so many different ways, this will seem like more than just an uphill walk.
Let’s see where Google’s available AI language software will lead the digital assistant technology.
Image source: Pixabay
