Blog
The latest news from Google AI
Introducing Semantic Experiences with Talk to Books and Semantris
Friday, April 13, 2018
Posted by Ray Kurzweil, Director of Engineering and Rachel Bernstein, Product Manager, Google Research
Natural language understanding
has evolved substantially in the past few years, in part due to the development of
word vectors
that enable algorithms to learn about the relationships between words, based on examples of actual language usage. These vector models map semantically similar phrases to nearby points based on equivalence, similarity or relatedness of ideas and language. Last year, we used hierarchical vector models of language to
make improvements to Smart Reply for Gmail
. More recently, we’ve been exploring other applications of these methods.
Today, we are proud to share
Semantic Experiences
, a website showing two examples of how these new capabilities can drive applications that weren’t possible before.
Talk to Books
is an entirely new way to explore books by starting at the sentence level, rather than the author or topic level.
Semantris
is a word association game powered by machine learning, where you type out words associated with a given prompt. We have also published “
Universal Sentence Encoder
”, which describes the models used for these examples in more detail. Lastly, we’ve provided a
pretrained semantic TensorFlow module
for the community to experiment with their own sentence and phrase encoding.
Modeling approach
Our approach extends the idea of representing language in a vector space by creating vectors for larger chunks of language such as full sentences and small paragraphs. Since language is composed of hierarchies of concepts, we create the vectors using a hierarchy of modules, each of which considers features that correspond to sequences at different temporal scales. Relatedness, synonymy, antonymy, meronymy, holonymy, and many other types of relationships may all be represented in vector space language models if we train them in the right way and then pose the right “questions”. We describe this method in our paper, “
Efficient Natural Language Response for Smart Reply
.”
Talk to Books
With
Talk to Books
, we provide an entirely new way to explore books. You make a statement or ask a question, and the tool finds sentences in books that respond, with no dependence on keyword matching. In a sense you are talking
to
the books, getting responses which can help you determine if you’re interested in reading them or not.
Talk to Books
The models driving this experience were trained on a billion conversation-like pairs of sentences, learning to identify what a good response might look like. Once you ask your question (or make a statement), the tools searches all the sentences in over 100,000 books to find the ones that respond to your input based on semantic meaning at the sentence level; there are no predefined rules bounding the relationship between what you put in and the results you get.
This capability is unique and can help you find interesting books that a keyword search might not surface, but there’s still room for improvement. For example, this experiment works at the sentence level (rather than at the paragraph level, as in Smart Reply for Gmail) so a “good” matching sentence can still be taken out of context. You might find books and passages that you didn’t expect, or the reason a particular passage was highlighted might not be obvious. You may also notice that being well-known does not make a book sort to the top; this experiment looks only at how well the individual sentences match up. However, one benefit of this is that the tool may help people discover unexpected authors and titles, and surface books in a way that is fresh and innovative.
Semantris
We are also providing
Semantris
, a word association game that is powered by this technology. When you enter a word or phrase, the game ranks all of the words on-screen, scoring them based on how well they respond to what you typed. Again, similarity, opposites and neighboring concepts are all fair-game using this semantic model.
Try it out yourself
to see what we mean! The time pressure in the Arcade version (shown below) will tempt you to enter in single words as prompts. The Blocks version has no time pressure, which makes it a great place to try out entering in phrases and sentences. You may enjoy exploring how obscure you can be with your hints.
Semantris Arcade
The examples we’re sharing today are just a few of the possible ways to think about experience and application design using these new tools. Other potential applications include classification, semantic similarity, semantic clustering, whitelist applications (selecting the right response from many alternatives), and semantic search (of which Talk to Books is an example). We hope you’ll come up with many more, inspired by these example applications. We look forward to seeing original and innovative uses of our
TensorFlow models
by the developer community.
Acknowledgements
Talk to Books was developed by Aaron Phillips, Amin Ahmad, Rachel Bernstein, Aaron Cohen, Noah Constant, Ray Kurzweil, Igor Krivokon, Vladimir Magay, Peter McKenzie, Bryan Richter, Chris Tar, Dave Uthus, and Ni Yan. Semantris was developed by Ben Pietrzak, RJ Mical, Steve Pucci, Maria Voitovich, Mo Adeleye, Diana Huang, Catherine McCurry, Tomomi Sohn, and Connor Moore. Core semantic search technology development was led by Brian Strope and Yunhsuan Sung. Fast scalable matching work was led by Sanjiv Kumar, Dave Dopson, and David Simcha. We'd also like to acknowledge Hallie Benjamin, Eric Breck, Mario Guajardo-Céspedes, Yoni Halpern, Margaret Mitchell, Ben Packer, Andrew Smart and Lucy Vasserman.
Labels
2018
accessibility
ACL
ACM
Acoustic Modeling
Adaptive Data Analysis
ads
adsense
adwords
Africa
AI
Algorithms
Android
Android Wear
API
App Engine
App Inventor
April Fools
Art
Audio
Augmented Reality
Australia
Automatic Speech Recognition
AutoML
Awards
BigQuery
Cantonese
Chemistry
China
Chrome
Cloud Computing
Collaboration
Compression
Computational Imaging
Computational Photography
Computer Science
Computer Vision
conference
conferences
Conservation
correlate
Course Builder
crowd-sourcing
CVPR
Data Center
Data Discovery
data science
datasets
Deep Learning
DeepDream
DeepMind
distributed systems
Diversity
Earth Engine
economics
Education
Electronic Commerce and Algorithms
electronics
EMEA
EMNLP
Encryption
entities
Entity Salience
Environment
Europe
Exacycle
Expander
Faculty Institute
Faculty Summit
Flu Trends
Fusion Tables
gamification
Gboard
Gmail
Google Accelerated Science
Google Books
Google Brain
Google Cloud Platform
Google Docs
Google Drive
Google Genomics
Google Maps
Google Photos
Google Play Apps
Google Science Fair
Google Sheets
Google Translate
Google Trips
Google Voice Search
Google+
Government
grants
Graph
Graph Mining
Hardware
HCI
Health
High Dynamic Range Imaging
ICCV
ICLR
ICML
ICSE
Image Annotation
Image Classification
Image Processing
Inbox
India
Information Retrieval
internationalization
Internet of Things
Interspeech
IPython
Journalism
jsm
jsm2011
K-12
Kaggle
KDD
Keyboard Input
Klingon
Korean
Labs
Linear Optimization
localization
Low-Light Photography
Machine Hearing
Machine Intelligence
Machine Learning
Machine Perception
Machine Translation
Magenta
MapReduce
market algorithms
Market Research
Mixed Reality
ML
ML Fairness
MOOC
Moore's Law
Multimodal Learning
NAACL
Natural Language Processing
Natural Language Understanding
Network Management
Networks
Neural Networks
NeurIPS
Nexus
Ngram
NIPS
NLP
On-device Learning
open source
operating systems
Optical Character Recognition
optimization
osdi
osdi10
patents
Peer Review
ph.d. fellowship
PhD Fellowship
PhotoScan
Physics
PiLab
Pixel
Policy
Professional Development
Proposals
Public Data Explorer
publication
Publications
Quantum AI
Quantum Computing
Reinforcement Learning
renewable energy
Research
Research Awards
resource optimization
Robotics
schema.org
Search
search ads
Security and Privacy
Semantic Models
Semi-supervised Learning
SIGCOMM
SIGMOD
Site Reliability Engineering
Social Networks
Software
Sound Search
Speech
Speech Recognition
statistics
Structured Data
Style Transfer
Supervised Learning
Systems
TensorBoard
TensorFlow
TPU
Translate
trends
TTS
TV
UI
University Relations
UNIX
User Experience
video
Video Analysis
Virtual Reality
Vision Research
Visiting Faculty
Visualization
VLDB
Voice Search
Wiki
wikipedia
WWW
Year in Review
YouTube
Archive
2019
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2018
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2017
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2016
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2015
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2014
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2013
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2012
Dec
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2011
Dec
Nov
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2010
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2009
Dec
Nov
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2008
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Jul
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
2007
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
Feb
2006
Dec
Nov
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
Apr
Mar
Feb
Feed
Follow @googleai
Give us feedback in our
Product Forums
.
