Ask HN: An idea that you could not implement?

Re:Ask HN: An idea that you could not implement? by wodenokoto on Saturday November 12, 2016 @03:56AM (#12937169)

> Perhaps speech could be translated to a string of word > alternatives with probabilities, and language > understanding gives a hint which alternatives make more > sense.

This is already done, but probabilities are used to determine the best alternative.

So basically we ask

    if p("which" | "Ding dong", "is dead") < p("witch" | "Ding dong", "is dead") 
    then print("witch")

Or basically, which of the alternatives have the highest probability given the context and we find a way to measure similar contexts.

This generally doesn't give us an understanding of the text.

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Re:Ask HN: An idea that you could not implement? by _nalply on Sunday November 13, 2016 @04:02AM (#12942504)

Yes. I didn't mean to propose that. I know that speech recognition already considers alternatives and probabilities.

The main focus of my proposal is something different: a more intuitive «understanding» using neural networks and lexicons. This is somewhat orthogonal to speech recognition.

Then I suggested that this «understanding» could help make speech recognition more reliable by adjusting of some probabilities.

You see, I have an important insight as a Deaf person. Lipreading only offers a small part of what a person could understand by hearing. But I am often still able to understand what a person says by guessing and using the discourse context to fill in the blanks. I am sure that we all do that to some extent, or we wouldn't have homonyms in the language.

This insight tells me that perhaps a disrupting innovation would be a more natural «understanding» of text (in written form) with the help of neural networks and a lexicon.

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