40: Making machines learn language - Interview with Janelle Shane on AI and machine learning
Channel: Ling Thusiasm
Date: 2020-01-17

If you feed a computer enough ice cream flavours or pictures  annotated with whether they contain giraffes, the hope is that the  computer may eventually learn how to do these things for itself: to  generate new potential ice cream flavours or identify the giraffehood  status of new photographs. But it’s not necessarily that easy, and the  mistakes that machines make when doing relatively silly tasks like ice  cream naming or giraffe identification can illuminate how artificial  intelligence works when doing more serious tasks as well.  

In  this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne interview  Dr Janelle Shane, author of You Look Like A Thing And I Love You and  person who makes AI do delightfully weird experiments on her blog and  twitter feed. We talk about how AI “sees” language, what the process of  creating AI humour is like (hint: it needs a lot of human help to curate  the best examples), and ethical issues around trusting algorithms.  

Finally,  Janelle helped us turn one of the big neural nets on our own 70+  transcripts of Lingthusiasm episodes, to find out what Lingthusiasm  would sound like if Lauren and Gretchen were replaced by robots! This  part got so long and funny that we made it into a whole episode on its  own, which is technically the February bonus episode, but we didn’t want  to make you wait to hear it, so we’ve made it available right now! This  bonus episode includes a more detailed walkthrough with Janelle of how  she generated the  Robo-Lingthusiasm transcripts, and live-action reading of some of our  favourite Robo-Lauren and Robo-Gretchen moments. 

Support Lingthusiasm on Patreon to gain access to the Robo-Lingthusiasm episode and 35 previous bonus episodes. https://www.patreon.com/lingthusiasm

Also for our patrons, we’ve made a Lingthusiasm Discord server  – a private chatroom for Lingthusiasm patrons! Chat about the latest  Lingthusiasm episode, share other interesting linguistics links, and  geek out with other linguistics fans. (We even made a channel where you  can practice typing in the International Phonetic Alphabet, if that  appeals to you!) 

For links to the things mentioned in this episode: https://lingthusiasm.com/post/190298658151/lingthusiasm-episode-40-making-machines-learn