[P] Look up words by their description

Submitted by phraisely t3_y9x4ac in MachineLearning

My writing process is a constant back and forth between jotting down a few words and a [insert] placeholder, as in the "I'll-complete-that-sentence-later-once-I-remember-the-correct-word" note.

So, I built phraisely. It is a reverse thesaurus: you input a detailed description, and the model returns its best guesses.

Compared to the existing solutions for this task, phraisely attempts to better understand the full context in your query, making it more accurate when looking up words using long descriptions.

For example, if I search for "being home at night watching Netflix on the couch", results can contain "relaxing" and "unwinding" but also "binge-watching" since I mentioned Netflix. Bonus points when I get some slang in the results (e.g. couch-potatoing). [see pic below]

The aim is to have an assistant that writes with you. But it doesn't do it for you. Overall, I believe that writing is a frustrating process. Frustration stimulates creativity. And creativity is precious.

It is the first functioning version of the app. I'm regularly reviewing the output's quality and am working on tailoring it better to user needs. Also, my long term plan would be introducing languages other than English in the results. Although, the language model can already understand some input text from other common languages, like Spanish.

You can have a play around at: https://phraisely.com/. It's free.

Comments and suggestions are welcome. Thank you.

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Comments

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bluboxsw t1_it8fsgn wrote

I would like to see something more before registering. I don't consider it free if you need to exchange personal info.

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marr75 t1_it9a9z5 wrote

You also get a very slow rate of queries once you do sign up for free.

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phraisely OP t1_itbjl63 wrote

More free queries could be helpful, I guess.The tool is free and comes with no ads (my preference at the moment). However, users hitting the server comes with a cost on the large scale of things.

I'll work on it (increasing the number of free queries, not the ads) and see what I can do :)

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marr75 t1_itblwi0 wrote

I was trying to get a feel for it and can't even remember how many queries I issued. 3-5 maybe? There was no indicator that I was using a quota (especially a quota that small) when suddenly I was told I needed to wait 224 hours for more queries.

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phraisely OP t1_itbmo8g wrote

Thanks for that. I'll work on adding a query count - at the moment the count is shown in the 'Account' section.

I agree. A more explicit count can be helpful.

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marr75 t1_itbnukd wrote

I edited down the flatly negative part of what I wrote above because you're engaging so sincerely to improve it. I can't imagine getting a feel for it without running a lot of queries (100 a month or 10 per hour or 1 per minute, something like this). On top of that, the job to be done here is a little suspect for me. Are there people who have a commercially viable need to get a phrase back for a description?

The 2 tests I wanted to try were 2 very specific words I can't remember. The first is one of those german multi-word combinations that means, "the problem is solved by the mere structure of the solution." I don't think that word is probably even in the dictionary based on the results I was getting and I also started to learn that it was giving me back short phrases instead of words, which was disappointing. The second word means "distribution preserving" and I didn't get a chance to test it but it's got latin roots and I'm skeptical phraisely has it in the dictionary, too.

Overall, I was hoping the technology on display would be more powerful. I guess I'd pay $1 for either of those words.

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phraisely OP t1_itbuaf0 wrote

Thank you. Appreciated.

To be honset, at the moment I want to play around, have fun and try to build something that could be useful, even for a little niche of users. Commercial viability comes next, I think.

I've added 'paid plans' because, well, you get support if you ask for it :)

You are probably right; the user might need to play around a little before being confident about using it. So, the number of free queries can help with that.

I'll work on it.

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phraisely OP t1_it8h3g9 wrote

Agreed. I've added an example in the post. To be clear, *only* the email address is required. *No* other information is required.

I've posted to have feedback from users. So, I would be grateful for that.

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ReginaldIII t1_it959lw wrote

Why do you need email addresses at all? Like by all means have an opt-in mailing list to talk about updates. Have a discord server for support. But why force people to provide an email address other than the paywall?

  • Try me out - Free - 3 queries per month
  • Hobby - $0.99 per 100 queries. Must use within 1 day.
  • Professional - $9 per 5,000 queries. Must use within 30 days.

I'm sorry this just isn't at all viable as a payment scheme. You are never going to gain a consistent userbase.

And realistically, if your compute requirements are high enough that this costing model is necessary then you've just learned why Netflix has never used the winning entry to it's recommender systems challenges in production, because they tend to be too computationally expensive to use in anger.

Why not look at a document retrieval system like Marqo https://github.com/marqo-ai/marqo ?

Put words into Marqo as keys with blobs of text of their usage and or written definitions as the documents.

It will probably retrieve relevant words from natural language queries well enough to be used for this purpose. And it will be cheap to evaluate.

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phraisely OP t1_itbkyxo wrote

Thank you for your comment.

Email registration is to encourage responsible use and limit any misuse of the tool (or attacks). I'll work on it and see whether I can improve the free trial / registration.

Pricing depends on many factors. Probably this is not the place to discuss that. Also, they can become outdated quickly and be misleading. But this is my opinion and might be wrong :)

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darkshenron t1_it9pzqy wrote

Why not just use BERTs fill-mask capabilities?

https://huggingface.co/roberta-base?text=The+goal+of+life+is+%3Cmask%3E.

It’s free and doesn’t need email

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phraisely OP t1_itbhkwr wrote

Thank you for your comment. In my opinion, the use cases are a bit different.

Fill-mask capabilities are not the same as looking up words by their description. [Although you might adapt it to fill the placeholder straight away. But that is a different tool]

Also, I think what you are saying about 'it does not need email' is *not* entirely correct. HuggingFace requires you to log in once you reach the rate limit (and do not want to wait to run further queries)

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ZestyData t1_ita3raa wrote

Getting real sick of people posting free LLMs behind their own API as some sort of paid product.

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Imlard89 t1_itar767 wrote

I don't understand what the issue with that is? As long as the API is of value itself.

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PureOctane t1_itam7yr wrote

Every week it’s another episode of “how can I make money by fine-tuning BERT/GPT”

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ChuckSeven t1_it8asik wrote

Can you say a little more about how it works under the hood?

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phraisely OP t1_it8finz wrote

In the back-end, there is a large language model trained on books and internet data. The aim is to have a model that knows words from literature as well as idioms/slang.

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123A321 t1_it8svck wrote

I think chuck is asking for things like "does location based query in document embedding space" or something.

It's very obvious that a natural language AI uses a language model and that this model is trained on books and internet data.

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ChuckSeven t1_itkjrbj wrote

Sounds like it's a fine-tuned large language model or maybe just a large language model with a good prompting technique.

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manimino t1_it8taxc wrote

A part-of-speech filter would make this much more useful, and it should be really easy to add.

For example, in your "netflix" prompt, I might want the output "cozy", so I'd specify an adjective.

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phraisely OP t1_it8umly wrote

Thank you for the comment. I agree! It is something I can work on.

However, you could potentially ask the model that you are looking for a noun or adjective etc. For example: "an adjective for being home at night watiching netflix on the couch"

Thank you! Appreciated!

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phraisely OP t1_it83kw5 wrote

This might also be relevant for r/whatstheword

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RafaeldeCampos t1_it8lmyb wrote

Something like this?

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phraisely OP t1_it8nnmx wrote

I think onelook is doing a great job.

However, I wanted a tool that could (i) understand the full context in the query and (ii) be accurate when looking up words using *long* and *detailed* descriptions. I couldn't make onelook work well for that use case (also noted in their FAQ).

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RafaeldeCampos t1_itde6g1 wrote

I work in research and end up using onelook quite a lot when writing. I will for sure try your tool. Thanks for putting your work into it and making it available for free for everyone to use.

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phraisely OP t1_itfqx88 wrote

Thank you. Please let me know of you have any comments or suggestions once you have the chance to pay to play with it.

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richi3f t1_itbi70i wrote

Oh that’s super cool! I always wanted something like that when writing & actually thought about making it a weekend project. It’s nice to see it existing now!

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phraisely OP t1_itblmc8 wrote

Thank you! Appreciated.
Let me know if you have any comments or suggestions :)

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SolverTom t1_itai9js wrote

Really cool!

Reminds me a lot of the game Semantle. I wonder if you could somehow gamify this?

Come up with a phrase to match the word or the other way where you are given prompts and need to guess the word. I'd definitely play!

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phraisely OP t1_itbg76k wrote

Thank you! I thought about running a game in line of your suggestions on twitter to check the appetite for this type of games. I'll give a think to it :)

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