Show HN: Knowledge engine – instant answers to any question | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Knowledge engine – instant answers to any question

quickanswers.io

48 pointsfchollet46 comments

This actually worked really well for me for factual information, for example, I asked "When was the World Trade Center Built?" and it gave me the correct date. For a lot of factual stuff, it worked well.

There are some catches with word similarities, for example, "What is the lifespan of a turtle?" worked fine, but "How long can a turtle live?" and various re-phrasings result in very different answers, most of them correct within the context of the content they were scraped from, but some resulted in no answers at all.

Separately, the system doesn't handle preposterous questions very well, like "Who won the World Cup in 2009?" it says Italy won it, but I think it was some other thing referred to as a World Cup.

There are a lot of questions on Quora about personal experience like what it's like to have a family member die of cancer or what it was like to be in the WTC during the 9/11 attacks, and questions about these kinds of experience return nothing for the most part, despite being available via other resources (it's not all locked into Quora).

Very great first go, I'm really interested in seeing how this progresses. Like you say, if you could scrape a lot more data, this would produce a very interesting spectrum of information.

It'd probably be good to scrape some of the "How to" sites too, I asked "How does a gasoline engine work?" and the responses were... funny? :)

Interesting insight, thank you!

I think crowd-based approaches and machine-based approaches will always have very different strengths and weaknesses. The quality of algorithmic answers will generally (always?) be well below that of human-written ones, especially at first.

However, in the long term I can see machine-based approaches "winning", simply because of their near-infinite scalability (and the sort of insight that emerges from enormous scale). Take web search: if started out with hand-curation in the portal era, until that got wiped out by algos and scrapers that could better manage the growing scale of the web (and exploit patterns only visible at scale, like PageRank).

Human knowledge, including the sum of personal experiences of the people who express themselves on the web, is now at a size where it is no longer human-manageable. I see enormous potential here to extract, understand and navigate that knowledge using algorithms.

Yep, I agree on the whole. The problem that I've seen in a lot of cases is that the resources that collect knowledge and display it on the web don't necessarily incentivize the knowledgeable to contribute or reward them for doing so in the best possible way.

What you end up with is a high signal to noise for quality, factual content, and for things where facts are not even expected (politics, etc...) you often end up with a polarity that doesn't acknowledge the other side exists. Beyond all that there is a huge amount of sarcasm, humor and nuance to content that will be hard for a machine to figure out on its own, but hopefully you can find a way to separate the wheat from the chaff :)

A discussion of the algorithm powering this can be found at: http://www.sphere-engineering.com/blog/quickanswers-io-a-new...

However there are actually several types of algorithms working for different kinds of questions. The most general one is explained above.

In the longer term, I'd like to read the entirety of the web and build a complete semantic bayesian map matching a maximum of knowledge items. Also, it would be nice to have access to a visualization tool for the different answers available and their frequency across sectors of opinion, thus solving the problem of subjectivity (which Wikipedia deals with by completely ignoring it).

If you haven't already, check out Massimo Marchiori's ideas for his (now defunct) Volunia search engine [1]. You are definitely onto something potentially revolutionary here.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massimo_Marchiori

"What is the meaning of life?"

> 42

"How many roads must a man walk down before you can call him a man?"

> The answer my friend, is blowin' in the wind.

"How old are you?"

> I have been online since April 2014.

Cool.

My favorite test for this sort of thing is asking questions about "President Bush." Any successful engine is going to have to ask for clarification: Do you mean senior or junior? This chokes on questions about Bush.

I am working on handling ambiguity, as well as questions that don't have one definite answer (eg. "how should I invest 10k at a 5 year term?"). Possibly through an interface that shows a spectrum of answers and their sources.

Asking for clarification would also be much needed, of course.

Keep in mind this engine is still a very early prototype.

I'm very impressed, in any case!

When was the first Macintosh computer released?

1467 B.C.

Needs some work...

That's alright, wolfram alpha tells you the date the raincoat was invented when you plug in that question. (google gets it right)

It got the reference, but didn't answer my question:

> "what is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?"

> "Monty Python and the Holy Grail is a 1975 British comedy film written and performed by the comedy group of Monty Python (Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Michael Palin), as directed by Gilliam and Jones. It was conceived during the hiatus between the third and fourth series of their popular BBC television programme Monty Python's Flying Circus. "

It answered both "Who was Klaus Nomi?" and "Why do pigs fly?" correctly. That's a lot better than I usually get with these things.

> discussing surface area of an infinite manifold

yeah you better edit it dang

It told you that about Klaus Nomi or flying pigs?

just commenting that an earlier draft of your post mentioned something specific about [the space that systems like this attempt to map] that we both know is overreaching our knowledge of what knowledge is.

Oh, I get it now. Yup, I went overboard and then edited it back.

These things always suck so badly that I don't think I've ever gotten a good answer out of one. This, astonishingly, gave me two right off the bat. But yes, the bar could hardly be lower.

My question to the machine: Who is the happiest man in the world, the answer of the engine: Forbes Magazine named Carlos Slim Helu, a Mexican businessman, the richest man in the world as of March 2010. So the engine assimilate happiness with beying the richest man.

It got the Caribou coffee question of the day, "what battle ended the civil war" "surrender at Appomattox ended the civil war"

Wow! Many years ago I tried to do the same. Did not manage to get far. I am seriously impressed by what you have achieved

"If I filled a one square light year cube with plain chobani greek yogurt, how many calories would it contain?"

> Sorry, I don't know.

Come on man. If you're not going to optimize for the important questions, why bother? /s

Haha. Good job. This will be fun to play with.

I just had to try wolfram alpha. It eventually understood

"how many calories would one cubic light year of greek yoghurt contain?"

Cool stuff!

Perhaps a bit different, but Id love to see this implemented for specific subsets of information. Even better, a DIY version where I could enter my own QAs (or get them crowdsourced). There could be a lot of use cases for such an app.

Awesome and amazing piece of work here.

Don't ask why I searched this, but I found one problem out of everything I searched: http://i.imgur.com/cGlclWU.png

From "How much does an elephant wiegh?" on Answers.com:

Less than your mum

There are some problems with answers form SO, example "What is monad?", but nice overall. Some answers could be combined into one like "Where is New Zealand?"

It cant't answer "tell me about abundant numbers" or "should I take the red or blue pill". This reminds me of askjeeves(shudder)

I asked how to make a grilled cheese sandwich and it gave me some business from stackoverflow. Is this just supposed to be for techie type questions?

I understand the difficulty involved in doing this but, I would have liked it talk about itself. what is quickanswers.io? Sorry, I don't know.

"Who are you?" - I am a natural language question-answering engine.

>who is president of mexico

Politics portal

>who killed kennedy

Men Who

>what is the date of google's IPO

June 25, 2014

The engine can't answer this one: How would I achieve instantaneously that a girl desires to be with me? Answer: Don't know

Looking for such information pretty much guarantees she won't.

Cute remark!, I suggest to the engine makers that they detect this type of situation and suggest some form of consolation

relevant: "Relational Inference for Wikiﬁcation", Xiao Cheng Dan Roth, UI-UC

http://cogcomp.cs.illinois.edu/papers/ChengRo13.pdf

You should post your ideas for changing the web, I'd be interested in hearing them.

Is God real? - Answer: Sorry, I don't know.

One day, maybe...

Maybe the engine could answer something like this:

"If There's a God, God invented reality, therefore God is not real, because He transcends reality"

It would not answer what you expect, cause theres no objective answer to that, but the engine could play a game with the words you used showing some "sense of humor"

"What is the dollar to yen conversion rate?" > Sorry, I don't know.

"Where is O'Hare?" > Sorry, I don't know.

"What time is it in Japan?" > Sorry, I don't know.

Needs a little work...

On the space of all valid questions, there are many it can't answer. Judging from my logs, it's still doing pretty well on most questions. Even though people are trying hard to trick it with impossible questions.

Strong AI is not there just yet; this is but a rough implementation of a fairly simple algorithm: http://www.sphere-engineering.com/blog/quickanswers-io-a-new...

Ah... I commented on this because I specifically wasn't trying to trick the system or ask "impossible" questions.

I understand it's still developing and improving. Good luck!

"Who am i"

You are the user

Lol

"Who are you" also gives a nice response. "I am a natural language question-answering engine."

"what should i give?" answered with:

GRANT SELECT,UPDATE ON my_schema.* TO 'my_user'@'my_host' IDENTIFIED BY 'my_password';

Is there a God?

answer: Hahaha

Magical!

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