Google Chairman tells US senators Apple's Siri could pose 'competitive threat'

Re:Google Chairman tells US senators Apple's Siri could pose... by orijing on Sunday November 06, 2011 @01:07AM (#3201909)

That's a blatant lie.

In light of the recent monopoly hearings in the Senate, Mr. Schmidt is clearly trying to persuade Senators that Google is weak and vulnerable. But Google published findings that show that in natural language processing, it's really the quantity [1] that determines quality. Note in particular the discussion of "stupid backoff" (a smoothing/interpolation technique), which relies on the raw quantity of data. Who has a copy of the Internet's treasure-trove of text in its data centers?

Ultimately, NLP is something that's Google's to win if it truly desired. I'm not sure what powers Siri directly, but large data is Google's answer, and it's much more effective than Mr. Schmidt would make you believe.

[1] Large Language Models in Machine Translation: http://acl.ldc.upenn.edu/D/D07/D07-1090.pdf

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Re:Google Chairman tells US senators Apple's Siri could pose... by jerrya on Sunday November 06, 2011 @01:15AM (#3201927)

I find it interesting that at this moment, your comment seems to be the most highly rated one, whereas my post,(http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3201862) which makes much the same point using a famous literary metaphor, is currently at -2 :)

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Re:Google Chairman tells US senators Apple's Siri could pose... by artursapek on Sunday November 06, 2011 @01:16AM (#3201932)

He made the point a lot better than you did :)

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Re:Google Chairman tells US senators Apple's Siri could pose... by CamperBob on Sunday November 06, 2011 @02:35AM (#3202122)

Keep in mind that Song of the South was consigned to the memory hole by Disney at least 20 years ago, if not more. I'd be surprised if anyone under 30 even gets that reference, or sees how it might describe Google's attitude.

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Re:Google Chairman tells US senators Apple's Siri could pose... by pohl on Sunday November 06, 2011 @09:17AM (#3202699)

It would be nice if the Uncle Remus cycle of stories only existed in that movie and could be so easily removed from cultural circulation.

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