Yoshua Bengio

So the learner is gonna try to learn by itself, maybe be using some exploration and whatever, but the teacher can choose, can have an influence on the interaction with the learner so as to guide the learner, maybe teach it the things that the learner has most trouble with, or just add the boundary between what it knows and doesn't know and so on.

So there's a tradition of these kind of ideas from other fields and like tutorial systems, for example, and AI.

And of course, people in the humanities have been thinking about these questions.

But I think it's time that machine learning people look at this because in the future, we'll have more and more

human-machine interaction with the human in the loop.

And I think understanding how to make this work better.

So I would say it's everything having to do with the non-linguistic knowledge, which implicitly you need in order to make sense of sentences.

Things like the Winograd Schema, so these sentences that are semantically ambiguous,

In other words, you need to understand enough about the world in order to really interpret properly those sentences.

I think these are interesting challenges for machine learning because they point in the direction of building systems that both understand how the world works and its causal relationships in the world and associate that knowledge with how to express it in language, either for reading or writing.

You speak French?

Yes, it's my mother tongue.

I think it's independent of language.

I would like to build systems that can use the same principles, the same learning mechanisms to learn from human agents, whatever their language is.

Yeah, of course, there are differences between languages and maybe some are slightly better at some things.

But in the grand scheme of things, where we're trying to understand how the brain works and language and so on, I think these differences are minute.

Listen to your inner voice.

Don't, you know, be trying to just please the crowds and the fashion.

And if you have a strong intuition about something that is not contradicted by actual evidence, go for it.

I mean, it could be contradicted by people.