Beyond Siri on the iPhone: How could

intelligent systems change the way we

interact with technology and take

decisions?

Yousif Almas

December 2011

Siri: Artificial Intelligence (AI) for All?

Intelligent System

A system that recognizes its environment and

takes actions that maximize its chances of success.

Haven’t we been using AI for years?

Artificial Intelligence - Problems

• Knowledge Representation

• Learning – Machine Learning

• Natural Language Processing (NLP)

• Perception - Computer Vision and Hearing

Why Beta? Apple Creates “Perfect” Products?

Because language is a complex tool and NLP require more advancement

Natural Language Processing (NLP)• A field of computer science and linguistics concerned with the interactions

between computers and human (natural) languages.

• Approaches

– Deep analysis (use linguistic resources such as grammar analysis, etc.)

– Shallow analysis (statistical, use large collections of text )

– Hybrid

• Major Tasks

– Automatic Summarisation (Microsoft Word?)

– Natural Language Understanding (Siri?)

– Speech Recognition (Siri?)

– Machine Translation (Google versus. Sakhr)

– Sentiment Analysis

– Information Retrieval

– Information Extraction

Steps in Natural Language Processing (NLP)

Deep Approach (Linguistic Analysis)

Natural Language Processing (NLP)

• Deep linguistic analysis so the computer can

interpret the text:

Natural Language Processing (NLP)

Shallow Approach (Statistical Analysis)

• Systems can use the large amount of textual

information readily available (e.g. on the web)

to produce statistical information and drive

generalisations that can be used as rules for

predictions/classifications (language

independent?)

Natural Language Processing

Accuracy Levels – Varies

How could intelligent language

processing systems assist us further?

Information Overload and Decision Making

“Intelligent (NLP) Systems to Assist”

Herbert Simon

(Nobel Prize in Economics, Awarded 1978)Information Overload and

Bounded Rationality

“What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its

recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a

need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of

information sources that might consume it.”

[Herbert Simon]

News, Blogs, Chats, etc. and their Influence

“Intelligent (NLP) Systems to Assist”

Daniel Kahneman

(Nobel Prize in Economics, Awarded 2002) Human Psychology

- “Traces of what people feel and believe can be found in text” [Daniel Kahneman]

- “Frequency Correlates with acceptability” [Richard Kittredge]

Who do we trust? The average opinion ?

Again – Frequency Correlates with Acceptability

Sentiment Analysis – Positive or Negative?

Systems Need to be Cross Language and Dialect

20

Natural Language Processing - Language is Complex

falling or rising

انخفاض أمارتفاع

ascending or descending

ھبوط أمصعود

sick or healthy

مريضة أمصحية

Cartoons Source: http://www.aleqt.com/

- Positive for Stock Market or Commodities Market (Oil)?

- Positive for Buyer or seller?

Systems Need to be Cross Language

• Arabic:

– سنستخدمه (rich morphology, absence of vowels)

• English:

• We will use it (simple morphology).

• Chinese:

– 我们将使用它 (no spaces between words)

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Globalisation and Language - Banking and Finance

Demand in Europe and USA for market researchers and analysts

fluent in Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Russian or Turkish

28/05/2012 09:09 23

“I have been dealing with these big mathematical models of forecasting the economy and

I am looking at what was going on in the last few weeks (credit crunch), if i can figure out

whether or not people are more fearful or changing to be euphoric and I have a third way

of figuring out which of the two things is working (stronger), i don't need any these of

those stuff (mathematical models), i can forecast the economy better than any way i

know, the trouble is that we can’t figure that out.“

Alan Greenspan on the Daily Show (2007)

Chairman of the Federal Reserve 1987-2006

In the Business World

Position: “Text Data Mining”

Job Description: The successful candidate will mine text data from numerous news

sources and incorporate the information into the proprietary trading systems.

Posted on www.efinancialcareers.com (2007)

“We are exploring how to incorporate techniques of parsing texts in our trading systems.”

Head of Trading Research Team (2007)

Major Global Investment Bank

(Personal Communication)

Gartner – Emerging Technologies and Mainstream Adoption

Content Analytics – NLP in Action

• Content analytics applications process content to derive answers to specific questions:– Shall I sell my “Apple” stocks?

– Shall I buy a Mercedes or a BMW?

• Sources of Content include: – blogs

– news portals

– databases (corporate)

– instant messaging

– social networks

– search engines

– images, audio and video (public and private)

Commercial Software using Content Analysis

Services using Content Analysis (NLP)

Text Analytics Market

• Text analytics solutions market is still immature (the vendors with the longest track records do not yet have software-as-a-service offerings), and some of the underlying capabilities are not as robust as the attractive user interface may suggest (dealing with non-English-language documents and documents with many domain-specific terms?).

[Gartner]

• NLP Intelligent systems will be more:- Accurate

- Cross Language

- Cross Domain (e.g. finance, sport, medicine)

As individuals, we will depend more on such systems deployed on Phones, Cars, Tablets, PCs, TVs, Kiosks, etc. and they will not be perceived as intelligent systems (as least not as now) in many daily tasks including:

- Buy/Sell decisions.

- Advise.

- Entertainment.

- Education.

Wrap Up – How Could Intelligent Systems

Change the way we take decisions

Thank You