Slightly contrarian, or maybe not-but is anyone else sort of fatigued with social media trying it's hardest to do it all for you? Algorithmic timelines telling me what happened while I was gone (trust me, twitter...I would have gotten to it eventually), prioritizing what shows up (trust me facebook, I do a very good job hiding content on my own), telling me what I ought to buy (trust me, Amazon if I wanted it-I'd either already buy it, or I'm buying it later when I have the disposable funds), and now arranging transportation when hinting at going out an about for me (trust me, facebook Messenger-I live seventeen steps away from a bus stop that carries me right into the heart of downtown-I'm good)

I have no mistakes that these features are probably loved by some, maybe even most, but more and more-while I don't want to disconnect FULLY from social media (while I much love the laconic, brevity inherent design of twitter, the fact that the 140 character limit is going away has me sighing heavily), I do sometimes finding myself wishing I could opt out and take a bit more control over the content I'm ostensibly subscribing to.

Has anyone else felt similarly, or could maybe phrase the phenomenon better than I have?

Well that's a pretty disappointing post: "Hey, we use our deep learning tools on text. Look at this 12 month old paper".

Everyone in the field has read that paper. It was good work! But there are lots of intriguing things mentioned in the post which deserve further details.

The most interesting thing to me is "more than 20 languages"!! That's pretty nice - the paper had some early results for Chinese, but if it can perform similarly to the English results across 19 other languages that is probably the state-of-the-art for many of them.

Yesterday I mentioned vodka to my wife in Facebook Messenger and a few minutes later she saw a vodka advertisement on her timeline. Obviously Messenger will never include end to end encryption.

I wonder if this is in response to Google's open sourcing of Parsey McParseface: http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2016/05/announcing-syntax...

> Understanding the various ways text is used on Facebook can help us improve people's experiences with our products

You mean show us more "relevant" ads ? Last time I checked, Facebook's *product" was advertising. Thanks, this is exactly what I miss in my life - more ads for products and services I don't need.

So excited that Facebook is going to understand everything I'm talking about privately with my "friends" and sell my identity to more ad buyers, who'll design more subliminal ads to squeeze the last millisecond of what's left of my attention span.

Is this the paper they said they based this on: "Text Understanding from Scratch": http://arxiv.org/abs/1502.01710

Here is example code for text classification from character-level using convolutional networks in Torch 7 https://github.com/zhangxiangxiao/Crepe

So I mean this is great but are they open sourcing it?

Is there a way for us to play with it? Or are they just bragging?

I think FB has a strategy here that plays along well with their messenger (and their emphasis on bots). Imagine the example they give "I would like to sell my old bike for $200, anyone interested?", being matched with another user who said "I am looking for a cheap bike nearby". This plays right into google's territory, with the ability to organize and match people's intentions.

Everything is deep nowadays. Somebody should do a parody product called DeepBalls

Looks like just text classifier, which classifies text snippets by predefined simple intent.

I would be interested to learn more about their research behind it. Will there be any papers released? Specifically: how much data did they train on? How many machines for how long? How did the different NN architectures perform?

I guess those things would be fine to share without revealing the inner workings.

Are they actually open-sourcing it? There doesn't seem to be link to the code in sight.

Now we're really well on the way into DeepSh*t.

When these things get just a little bit better, the Five Eyes agencies will suddenly not have a staffing problem any more.

I feel like the more AI gets into the middle of our online interactions, then the more AI will try to steer those interactions. There is already plenty of evidence that our online behaviour is strongly influenced by algorithms, and I suspect this is just the beginning. One reason why I log onto FB maybe once every couple months; it just feels like I'm being manipulated.

It is useful to hear what architectures they are using (e.g., BRNNs) and I appreciate the pointer to the original paper.

I was hoping for some open source code to read, or more detail on their models. Facebook is pretty good at open sourcing things, so hopefully more papers will be released and open source software as it makes sense for FB to do that.

EDIT: typos

Are they going to open source it so that everyone else can use DeepText?

My Facebook account was only for public posts and private messages only, to force myself not to post anything that Facebook might consider public as if it were private. This just made me give up on the company altogether.

Fun that you guys can train a neural net to deduce what I like better than me, but as they said at the CCC conference, everyone has to decide for themselves how close they are with their machines (though that was in the context of taking your laptop to the toilet, in context of leaving it alone unattended).

Ya know, I normally don't believe in these "Facebook is listening into your conversations"-type voices and opinions because it seems like such an invasion of privacy and the company wouldn't do something like _that_ without permission. However, after a recent episode where I _know_ Facebook was listening to my conversation[1], I'm now much more nervous based on this machine learning news. I've become highly critical and pessimistic when Facebook says things like "Better understanding people's interests" and "New deep neural network architectures", not so much because of what their intent with the data is, but how they receive that data. It's done so sneakily, this is what I disagree with. I normally don't have a problem with Google reading my emails and suggesting news topics on Google Now + my flights, etc., because they ask if they can, but with Facebook, there's an era of creepiness that they are always listening.

[1]: This past weekend, a close friend was telling me about his friend who works at Google and the following morning, this Google person came up on my "Friends suggestions". It was the most bizarre thing... I also confirmed with my friend if he looked this Google guy up later on Facebook, which may have prompted his Google friend to show up on mine, and he said he didn't touch Facebook after our conversation.

EDIT: For further clarity.

Isn't "text understanding engine" a poor description of what is basically a classifier?

I'd expect a text understanding engine to do more than classify, I'd expect it to read a bunch of sentences in context and then be able to answer questions about it:

John was walking down the stairs. John tripped and fell. John lays on the floor.

Describe John's status: Is he hurt or in pain? Is he standing?

I know that tech company M.O. is creeping invasiveness by acclimating users to marginally more Orwellian incursions of their privacy over time, but are we already at the point where something like this can gain widespread acceptance? Seems like the willingness of the general populace to prostrate itself to our newfangled corporate overlords is only accelerating.

I kind of think Google will win over Facebook in this particular war, based on what I have seen so far.

And here I was hoping to see links to published papers or God forbid the release of datasets for fellow researchers... Heck, even a trained model would be nice.

Seems like a PR stunt to attract talent.

Perhaps we're all computer simulations whose purpose is to a/b test marketing on real-world people based on their social media posts.

More creepy idealism from the team at Facebook.

Would love to see a compare / contrast between FB/GOOG/MSFT's offerings in this space.

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