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Comment by billybolton | Hacker News Reader

All ideas in NLP are garbage, and all of them are equally idiotic. These so called AI researchers don't have the slightest clue on what they are doing. If you are starting out, you'll probably be more successful ignoring these morons, and try inventing something yourself from the ground up by looking at advancements in cognitive science and linguistics. A new paradigm in AI is emerging, and it's not coming from engineers, but like all innovations, it's coming from the hard sciences (a skillset that the tech scene and Silicon Valley lacks).

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Given several NLP algorithms are able to achieve >90% accuracy and many more achieve >80% accuracy, how do you come to the conclusion that "all ideas in NLP are garbage".

80%-90% accuracy on your arbitrary data set is meaningless.Your cute NLP algorithms suffer miserably in real life. You are severely underestimating how complex language is if you think getting a high accuracy on these narrow tasks is a meaningful measure of progress. Language is a big open problem for cognitive scientists, and linguistics alike. What makes you think that these computer scientists are magically further ahead of these scientists to create true NLP? Alexa is shit, Google Duplex is shit, Siri is shit. All these NLP applications will continue to be shit, until we actually understand what language is and how it works.

It's really easy to say experts are wrong. It's a lot harder to prove it. So prove it. If you're coming in here to run down the current experts, I expect you to have a better solution. If not, I expect you to delete this comment as it adds absolutely nothing to the conversation.

Experts aren't wrong at all. The experts that Silicon Valley likes to favour and pour billions of dollars in are completely wrong, and it's funny how these best of the best are completely ignoring advancements that have taken place in niche fields over the past 50 years. Your so called 'experts' aren't even asking the right questions. They are all doing the exact same thing over and over again, expecting a different result.

Luckily there are extremely bright experts in other fields that do know what they are doing. But because they don't have the 'Harvard', 'Stanford' or what ever elitist label, they get ignored, and remain obscure.

Traditionally, "science advances one funeral at a time".

What is the most interesting recently published paper in that area?

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