Gary Marcus

Meme 1: Marcus was foolish to claim in 2015 that pure #deeplearning systems can't understand novel sentences; they already do Meme 2: Marcus is just saying what we already know: DL doesn't yet understand language These can't both be right

Another "understanding is binary" fallacy. Deep Learning systems can understand novel sentences well enough to translate them into multiple foreign languages. But it turns out this understanding is very shallow. Much more work to do!

Nobody is arguing that understanding is binary. Rather, when taken in good faith, what Marcus is saying is that DL understanding of language is very superficial. This is entirely accurate and the DL community would do well to start taking these criticisms seriously.

Have been puzzled: why such superficial understanding of language is still enough to win Jeopardy or Trivia, or imperfect but often not too shabb translation （written or oral sync）?