Boring Problems Are Sometimes the Most Interesting

In a recent position paper, Turing Award Winners Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun, make the case that symbolic methods are not needed in AI and that, while there are still many issues to be resolved, AI will be solved using purely neural methods. In this piece I issue a challenge: demonstrate that a purely neural approach to the problem of text normalization is possible. Various groups have tried, but so far nobody has eliminated the problem of unrecoverable errors, errors where, due to insufficient training data or faulty generalization, the system substitutes some other reading for the correct one. Solutions have been proposed that involve a marriage of traditional finite-state methods with neural models, but thus far nobody has shown that the problem can be solved using neural methods alone. Though text normalization is hardly an “exciting” problem, I argue that until one can solve “boring” problems like that using purely AI methods, one cannot claim that AI is a success.