Question Understanding and Siri

This week saw the introduction of Apple Computer's new iPhone 4S. Not all of the reviews have been kind. For those expecting the next hardware answer to the Android-based competition, the new phone fell short of the blogosphere's rumored expectations. However, Steve Job's final creation (announced only a day before his death) may prove to offer far more than its largely unchanged exterior reveals. This device introduces Siri-- a personal assistant that, according to Apple, "understands what you say." Okay, Apple is not above some hyperbole. Recall in 1984 that the Macintosh was introduced with the phrase "insanely great!" Well, it was. Nonetheless, Siri (whose parentage includes SRI, Inc. and DARPA) appears to be much more than some clever parlor trick. It seems to break the "understanding" barrier with some remarkable first steps.

What makes Siri an important accomplishment is not just its ability to perform speech recognition and retrieve answers (though it represents significant advancement in both areas). Siri attempts to understand the questions asked. It takes context into consideration. Here is Apple's example.

So when you ask “Any good burger joints around here?” Siri will reply “I found a number of burger restaurants near you.” Then you can say “Hmm. How about tacos?” Siri remembers that you just asked about restaurants, so it will look for Mexican restaurants in the neighborhood.

Apple Computer, Inc. (http://www.apple.com/iphone/features/siri.html)

Siri is not the first computer program to perform such feats of human-like cognitive processing. But, Siri may be the first to place such capabilities in the palm of your hand at consumer prices. It's not yet Watson-on-a-chip, but it's getting there faster than I thought. Form factor and pricing aside, this is simply remarkable--insanely great! In order to appreciate the accomplishment it might be useful to consider what an achievement question comprehension is in humans.

At a very early age we all learn the power of asking questions. In it's simplest form we learn to repeatedly (and annoyingly) ask "Why?" to almost any assertion made by grownups. We test every claim and seek deeper understandings on everything. It's fascinating to watch unless you’re the parent caught in your child's "why loop." Children also learn quite early how to understand questions (and avoid giving answers). "Who drew pictures on the wall in crayon?" Complete understanding by the guilty child followed by silence.

Of the two skills-- question asking and question understanding-- we seem to do a better job at the latter. When we ask-- "When will gas prices drop to reasonable levels?" we're asking a loaded question. What's "reasonable"? Some may think that it is unreasonable for prices to drop from a environmental viewpoint. Others might long for the days of 25 cent per gallon gasoline. The question sounds simple enough until you unpack it and discover that it is either too vague or contains an assumption (i.e. that prices will drop) or both.  On the other hand, when someone says-- "Do you know what time it is?"-- we typically understand that they are asking for the current time of day and not merely whether we happen to know the current time.

I don't want to diminish the importance of asking good questions. Good questions--carefully crafted questions-- can guide our investigations of what's true. They can define the very starting point and scope of inquiry. If you pay much attention to political discourse these days you might think that good questions are in short supply. It's a concern for a free and democratic society. More attention needs to be paid to learning to ask good questions.  Good questions are clearly very important. However, I'd like to take a moment to concentrate on question comprehension for I think it is vital to seeking and judging answers.

Once a question is asked, how is it understood? What is this simple yet amazing process? We don't even think about it. We just do it.  And, we have been doing it since we were very young. Perhaps this is, in part, why it has been so difficult for computer scientists to develop computers that can understand questions. We didn't think it was all that difficult an activity. After all, we've been understanding questions since we were asked a simple  object identification question such as --"What's this?" (as we are shown our favorite toy).

It was this problem of question understanding that Dr. Wendy G. Lehnert tackled in her 1977 doctoral thesis, "The Process of Question Answering - A Computer Simulation of Cognition." Yale University (1977). Before a human or computer can retrieve/provide an answer to a question, that question must be "understood". Lehnert developed a taxonomy of the many structural types of questions and crafted an interesting approach to conceptually analyzing the question in order to provide an appropriate answer. The notion of context is key.

Many aspects of this new application have me excited. Research and development in areas of computational linguistics, and what some are calling "computational knowledge" (see http://www.wolframalpha.com/ for one example ), are stepping out of the labs and into our practical lives. In time, I believe that we will view human thought processes differently. We may be better able to anticipate and correct for failures in our cognitive processing. This work brings into focus some of the complexities of human cognition. It may also help us see inward in a new way to better understand some of the ways we fail to understand each other.

Alright, I'm asking way too much of a device I just ordered and have yet to hold (pre-orders began today--Friday, October 7, 2011). My enthusiasm for this new application is clouding my thinking. Guilty as charged. It is, after all, just a phone. Nothing stays insanely great forever. Still, this represents a wonderful step in the evolution of our understanding of ourselves. And, that is always insanely great.

Jeopardizing Minds

We ask students to remember a lot. Much of this is factual information. And, much of this is forgotten after the exam. This is nothing new. What is new is the direction that technology is taking to retrieve the facts that we never retained or cannot remember.

During February’s Jeopardy special edition episodes, IBM’s Watson, a computer system designed to answer questions in natural language, won impressively over two Jeopardy record-holding participants. Watson won clue after clue, game after game, and is now being prepared for use as a diagnostic tool in medicine and other fields.

Human memory is no less remarkable. But, how we use our brains seems to change over time. In his book, Moon Walking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything (2011, The Penguin Press), Joshua Foer describes the history of impressive memory feats dating back to the fifth century B.C. He writes, "Once upon a time every literate person was versed in the techniques [of memorization]...Students were taught not just what to remember, but how to remember it." This skill served members of oral cultures for centuries.

Today, memorization of large amounts of information has turned from being a practical tool to a mere stunt as we discover new methods of storing and retrieving information. Foer's book chronicles his study of, and preparation for, the U.S. Memory Championship which is about all that remains of this memorization form. This is not to say that memorization is not being practiced. We all follow strategies for storing and retrieving information in our heads—especially students (although, use of Watson during exams would probably be forbidden). 

We choose different memory strategies depending on how we expect to use the information. This result was studied in the late 1970s by Elizabeth F. Loftus (University of California, Irvine) who found students stored information differently depending on whether they expected to merely recognize the correct answer from a set of choices or were asked to recall the answer. Columbia University psychologist Betsy Sparrow published an article in Science magazine (July, 2011) titled Google effects on memory: Cognitive consequences of having information at our fingertips. She, too, studied the effects of our expected use of information on our memory strategies. According to Sparrow, “when people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself and enhanced recall instead for where to access it." Put simply, we only memorize what we think we have to and look up the rest. We devise memory strategies appropriate to our expected use of the information. 

So, how are we using computer technology to help students improve their learning skills? What kind of memory strategies are we encouraging through practice? When we challenge students only with multiple choice questions are we encouraging a form of memorization that has decreasing utility? Since the 1960s, multiple-choice questions have been a favored computerized method of "engaging" the student through technology.  But, even by 1970 MIT researcher Jaime R. Carbonell ("Mixed-Initiative Man-Computer Dialogues") pointed out the limitations of these learning methods. In response, he developed a program called SCHOLAR that was capable of conducting Socratic-style dialogues in natural language on the topic of geography. Remarkably, this was done on a primitive computer (XDS-940) with incredibly small processing and storage capabilities. Over 40 years later our "go to" e-Learning tool continues to be the multiple choice quiz.

What kind of memory will humans need as the development of computerized search expands to eventually embed Watson on a chip? How are we helping enhance the student's ability to acquire the kinds of learning skills that will prove beneficial now and in the future? Is our comfort with recognition-based assessments that cover areas of factual knowledge ignoring a paradigm shift in the kind of information we need our brains to better organize and retain?

Just as the need to memorize certain types of information faded with the written word, perhaps we should re-examine the types of information we ask students to remember and the expectations we set for them in their use of that information. Minds that are trained to recognize answers or even recall large numbers of facts may be in serious jeopardy in a world where these types of memory retrieval feats are better performed by descendants of Watson.

On Why Our Nation is Stuck

I thought I'd share an inspiring clip (under 6 minutes) I came across in a post on a forum I follow.  It's an updated compilation of NASA video with Carl Sagan's voice-over explaining why humans go into space.

Watch the video 

Politicians are killing U.S. human space flight right now and the general public is oblivious.  It's sad.  It's not the most tragic thing, but deeply throttling back exploration is nonetheless a loss for this nation.

Here are two recent signs of this shift.  First, there is my recent conversation with a 20 year old student we'll call Buzz.  As I sometimes do, I started talking about spaceflight and the upcoming final launch of a Shuttle.  Buzz admitted that he didn't follow the space program too much.  Understandable.  Most people don't follow it unless there's a really big mission or (unfortunately) there's some sort of crisis.  I get it.  But, then Buzz tried to feign interest.  And, in as serious a tone as he could muster asked-- "Are they going to the moon?"  Seriously?  The moon?  Were you absent that day in school when they covered the 20th century?  I was flummoxed.

Then the very next day someone in the office suggested I take a look at Google's Scribe (check it out before they close GoogleLabs--a story for another time about retreating from success).  Scribe is like a Word doc editor except that it suggests the next word as you type.  Weird and sometimes creepy smart.  So, I tried it with some well-known phrases.  "Ask not what your country..." and "That's one small step for man" -- You get the idea.  It's probably not intended to find famous quotes, but I was giving it a try. Try it yourself.  Then I typed-- "We choose to go to the _______" and expected it to suggest moon.  It did not.  Google, with access to countless terabytes of data from which it can guesstimate the next word, completed the famous Kennedy charge to the nation with the word bathroom.  Yes, we choose (instead) to go to the friggin BATHROOM.  What??? And, I suppose "and do the other things...not because they are easy but because they are hard????"

So, if you are like me and feel that the country is adrift, is being driven off a cliff by conservatives, extreme conservatives, corporate interests, spineless politicians with no long-term visions beyond their next campaign, etc., etc., you now know why--  WE CHOOSE TO GO TO THE BATHROOM!  From the Earth to the Loo-- a new HBO mini-series.

There you have it.  No need to take public opinion polls.  Just use Google to reveal where we truly are these days.  Why are they shuttering programs that once put Americans in space?  It's because we literally and figuratively cannot get off the can.  Our collective rear ends are stuck!

Anyway, watch the video and get inspired again.  Take your phone to the bathroom and watch it there.  It's only 6 minutes or less.  More time than that and you'll just aggravate your hemorrhoids.

Mixed Modals

This is my first blog.

Blogs require unique titles.  This is as hard as coming up with a really strong but memorable password. You try one after another until one strikes you as suitable.  Exhaustion from the process plays a big part in eventually finding something that satisfies.  I won't share the titles I rejected.  All the clever ones seemed to have been taken. However, as I tried out each one I found myself occasionally thinking-- "That one is certainly possible."  Eventually I stepped back from the process and saw this common phrase-- Certainly Possible.  Good enough.

The title "Certainly Possible" is fun because it's a mixed modal phrase I often hear people use (myself included) when they are minimally acknowledging the legitimacy of some assertion. It starts out sounding like a vote of support for some claim (certainly) but then diminishes that very endorsement by indicating the weakest modal claim for truth (possible). Ideas are sometimes like that.  They start out strong, bordering on something absolute. Then their value diminishes as they are scrutinized.  What's left is sometimes a small kernel of truth.  The excitement happens when these small nuggets of truth are connected together to form something bold and new.  At that point the declaration of possibility is a remarkable achievement.  We move forward a little in our understanding.

So, this blog is going to be about a lot of things.  It's my new sketchpad for capturing patterns I see in events and ideas. We'll see how this goes.  It's certainly possible that some good may come from these jottings.  I'll start with at least that much.