The Positional Encoding Magic: How Computers Understand Word Order

AI Public Literacy Series- ChatGPT Primer Part 3d

The Jumbled Mess Baffling AI Models

Human language is bewilderingly complex.

Word order intricacies give AI models fits trying to unravel meaning from our twisted word mazes.

Without help, they're lost, trying to decipher sentences like: "Cat the mat on sat the" or "Man bites dog". Yikes!

Positional Encoding - The Trail of Breadcrumbs

To learn these secrets, AI uses positional encoding to map words by their order. Each word gets a unique position tag.

For example, in the sentence "The quick brown fox", "The" gets encoding 1, "quick" gets 2, "brown" gets 3, and so on.

This number trail acts like breadcrumbs guiding models through language's messy mazes.

Now they can follow the clues to decode meaning.

The AI Compass for Word Sequence

Think of positional encoding as a compass providing directional guidance to situate words.

For instance, the encoding shows that in "Fox brown quick The", the positions are jumbled versus the normal 1-2-3-4 sequence.

This signals something is amiss to the AI.

It highlights how words connect based on order and context.

Mimicking how we intuitively grasp "dog bites man" vs "man bites dog".

This compass equips models to navigate the tangled grammar of human languages.

The Quest to Give AI "Night Vision"

Researchers refine positional encoding to boost AI's language vision - like giving them night goggles to see through messy complexities.

Step-by-step, models learn to map meaning from our weird, rule-bending word mazes.