Insight into the Value of Big Data and Human Conversation
April 5, 2018
Big data and AI have been tackling tons of written material for years. But actual spoken human conversation has been largely overlooked in this world, mostly due to the difficulty of collecting this information. However, that is on the cusp of changing as we discovered from a white paper from the Business and Local Government Resource Center, “The SENSEI Project: Making Sense of Human Conversations.”
According to the paper:
“In the SENSEI project we plan to go beyond keyword search and sentence-based analysis of conversations. We adapt lightweight and large coverage linguistic models of semantic and discourse resources to learn a layered model of conversations. SENSEI addresses the issue of multi-dimensional textual, spoken and metadata descriptors in terms of semantic, para-semantic and discourse structures.”
While some people are excited about the potential for advancement this kind of big data research presents, others are a little more nervous; for example, one or two of the 87 million individuals whose Facebook data found its way into the capable hands of GSR and Facebook.
In fact, there is a growing movement, according to the Guardian, to scale back big data intrusion. What makes this interesting is that advocates are demanding companies that harvest our information for big data purposes give some of that money back to the people whom the info originate, not unlike how songwriters are given royalties every time their music is used for film or television. Putting a financial stipulation on big data collection could cause SENSEI to top its brake pedal. Maybe?
Patrick Roland, April 5, 2018
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