Show HN: Semantic Calculator (king-man+woman=?)

nxa | 176 points

  data + plural = number
  data - plural = research
  king - crown = (didn't work... crown gets circled in red)
  king - princess = emperor
  king - queen = kingdom
  queen - king = worker
  king + queen = queen + king = kingdom
  boy + age = (didn't work... boy gets circled in red)
  man - age = woman
  woman - age = newswoman
  woman + age = adult female body (tied with man)
  girl + age = female child
  girl + old = female child
The other suggestions are pretty similar to the results I got in most cases. But I think this helps illustrate the curse of dimensionality (i.e. distances are ill-defined in high dimensional spaces). This is still quite an unsolved problem and seems a pretty critical one to resolve that doesn't get enough attention.
godelski | 2 months ago

> king-man+woman=queen

Is the famous example everyone uses when talking about word vectors, but is it actually just very cherry picked?

I.e. are there a great number of other "meaningful" examples like this, or actually the majority of the time you end up with some kind of vaguely tangentially related word when adding and subtracting word vectors.

(Which seems to be what this tool is helping to illustrate, having briefly played with it, and looked at the other comments here.)

(Btw, not saying wordvecs / embeddings aren't extremely useful, just talking about this simplistic arithmetic)

montebicyclelo | 2 months ago

First off, this interface is very nice and a pleasure to use, congrats!

Are you using word2vec for these, or embeddings from another model?

I also wanted to add some flavor since it looks like many folks in this thread haven't seen something like this - it's been known since 2013 that we can do this (but it's great to remind folks especially with all the "modern" interest in NLP).

It's also known (in some circles!) that a lot of these vector arithmetic things need some tricks to really shine. For example, excluding the words already present in the query[1]. Others in this thread seem surprised at some of the biases present - there's also a long history of work on that [2,3].

[1] https://blog.esciencecenter.nl/king-man-woman-king-9a7fd2935...

[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.09866

[3] https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.03862

spindump8930 | 2 months ago

Neat! Reminds me of infinite craft

https://neal.fun/infinite-craft/

antidnan | 2 months ago

Some of these make more sense than others (and bookshop is hilarious even if it's only the best answer by a small margin; no shade to bookshop owners).

  map - legend = Mercator projection
  noodle - wheat = egg noodle
  noodle - gluten = tagliatelle
  architecture - calculus = architectural style
  answer - question = comment
  shop - income = bookshop
  curry - curry powder = cuisine
  rice - grain = chicken and rice
  rice + chicken = poultry
  milk + cereal = grain
  blue - yellow = Fiji
  blue - Fiji = orange
  blue - Arkansas + Bahamas + Florida - Pluto = Grenada
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2 months ago

This is super neat.

I built a game[0] along similar lines, inspired by infinite craft[1].

The idea is that you combine (or subtract) “elements” until you find the goal element.

I’ve had a lot of fun with it, but it often hits the same generated element. Maybe I should update it to use the second (third, etc.) choice, similar to your tool.

[0] https://alchemy.magicloops.app/

[1] https://neal.fun/infinite-craft/

jumploops | 2 months ago

I don't get it but I'm not sure I'm supposed to.

    life + death = mortality
    life - death = lifestyle

    drug + time = occasion
    drug - time = narcotic

    art + artist + money = creativity
    art + artist - money = muse

    happiness + politics = contentment
    happiness + art      = gladness
    happiness + money    = joy
    happiness + love     = joy
lightyrs | 2 months ago

Here's a challenge: find something to subtract from "hammer" which does not result in a word that has "gun" as a substring. I've been unsuccessful so far.

__MatrixMan__ | 2 months ago

As you might expect from a system with knowledge of word relations but without understanding or a model of the world, this generates gibberish which occasionally sounds interesting.

grey-area | 2 months ago

This might be helpful: I haven't implemented it in the UI, but from the API response you can see what the word definitions are, both for the input and the output. If the output has homographs, likeliness is split per definition, but the UI only shows the best one.

Also, if it gets buried in comments, proper nouns need to be capitalized (Paris-France+Germany).

I am planning on patching up the UI based on your feedback.

nxa | 2 months ago

These are pretty good results. I messed around with a dumber and more naive version of this a few years ago[1], and it wasn't easy to get sensinble output most of the time.

[1]: https://github.com/GrantMoyer/word_alignment

GrantMoyer | 2 months ago

I've always wondered if there's s way to find which vectors are most important in a model like this. The gender vector man-woman or woman-man is the one always used in examples, since English has many gendered terms, but I wonder if it's possible to generate these pairs given the data. Maybe to list all differences of pairs of vectors, and see if there are any clusters. I imagine some grammatical features would show up, like the plurality vector people-person, or the past tense vector walked-walk, but maybe there would be some that are surprisingly common but don't seem to map cleanly to an obvious concept.

Or maybe they would all be completely inscrutable and man-woman would be like the 50th strongest result.

rdlw | 2 months ago

Not what it's meant for, I guess, but it's not very strong at chemistry ;-)

  salt - chlorine + potassium = sodium
  chlorine + sodium = rubidium
  water - hydrogen = tap water
It also has some other interesting outputs:

  woman + man = adult female body (already reported by someone else)
  man - hand = woman
  woman - hand = businesswoman
  businessman - male + female = industrialist
  telephone + antenna = television equipment
  olive oil - oil = hearth money
ale42 | 2 months ago

Reminds me of the very annoying word game https://contexto.me/en/

anonu | 2 months ago

This is super fun. Offering the ranked matches makes it significantly more engaging than just showing the final result.

skeptrune | 2 months ago

Interesting: parent + male = female (83%)

Can not personally find the connection here, was expecting father or something.

ericdiao | 2 months ago

There was a site like this a few years ago (before all the LLM stuff kicked off) that had this and other NLP functionality. Styling was grey and basic. That’s all I remember.

I’ve been unable to find it since. Does anyone know which site I’m thinking of?

afandian | 2 months ago

A few favorites:

wine - beer = grape juice

beer - wine = bowling

astrology - astronomy + mathematics = arithmancy

clbrmbr | 2 months ago

What about starting with the result and finding set of words that when summed together give that result?

That could be seen as trying to find the true "meaning" of a word.

galaxyLogic | 2 months ago

artificial intelligence - bullsh*t = computer science (34%)

nxa | 2 months ago

I've tried to get to "garage", but failed at a few attempts, ChatGPT's ideas also seemed reasonable, but failed. Any takers? :)

tiborsaas | 2 months ago

goshawk-cocaine = gyrfalcon , which is funny if you know anything about goshawks and gyrfalcons

(Goshawks are very intense, gyrs tend to be leisurely in flight.)

fallinghawks | 2 months ago

cool but not enough data to be useful yet I guess. Most of mine either didn't have the words or were a few % off the answer, vehicle - road + ocean gave me hydrosphere, but the other options below were boat, ship, etc. Klimt almost made it from Mozart - music + painting. doctor - hospital + school = teacher, nailed it.

Getting to cornbread elegantly has been challenging.

neom | 2 months ago

shows how bad embeddings are in a practical way

yigitkonur35 | 2 months ago

Huh, that's strange, I wanted to check whether your embeddings have biases, but I cannot use "white" word at all. So I cannot get answer to "man - white + black = ?".

But if I assume the biased answer and rearrange the operands, I get "man - criminal + black = white". Which clearly shows, how biased your embeddings are!

Funny thing, fixing biases and ways to circumvent the fixes (while keeping good UX) might be much challenging task :)

ignat_244639 | 2 months ago

I'm getting Navralitova instead of queen. And can't get other words to work, I get red circles or no answer at all.

TZubiri | 2 months ago

dog - cat = paleolith

paleolith + cat = Paleolithic Age

paleolith + dog = Paleolithic Age

paleolith - cat = neolith

paleolith - dog = hand ax

cat - dog = meow

Wonder if some of the math is off or I am not using this properly

Jimmc414 | 2 months ago

    hand - arm + leg = vertebrate foot
    snowman - man =  snowflake
    snowman - snow = snowbank
andrelaszlo | 2 months ago

man - intelligence = woman (36%)

woman + intelligence = man (77%)

Oof.

e____g | 2 months ago

It's interesting that I find loops. For example

car + stupid = idiot, car + idiot = stupid

wdutch | 2 months ago

Really?!

  man - brain = woman
  woman - brain = businesswoman
nikolay | 2 months ago

What does it mean when it surrounds a word in red? Is this signalling an error?

cabalamat | 2 months ago

"man-intelligence=woman" is a particularly interesting result.

dtj1123 | 2 months ago

wine - alcohol = grape juice (32%)

Accurate.

ericdiao | 2 months ago

Oh you have all the damn words. Even the Ricky Gervais ones.

coolcase | 2 months ago

mathematics - Santa Claus = applied mathematics

hacker - code = professional golf

downboots | 2 months ago

for founders :

love + time = commitment

boredom + curiosity = exploration

vision + execution = innovation

resilience - fear = courage

ambition + humility = leadership

failure + reflection = learning

knowledge + application = wisdom

feedback + openness = improvement

experience - ego = mastery

idea + validation = product-market fit

krishna-vakx | 2 months ago

uncle + aunt = great-uncle (91%)

great idea, but I find the results unamusing

matallo | 2 months ago

I tried:

-red

and:

red-red-red

But it did not work and did not get any response. Maybe I am stupid but should this not work?

havkom | 2 months ago
[deleted]
| 2 months ago

fluid + liquid = solid (85%) -- didn't expect that

blue + red = yellow (87%) -- rgb, neat

black + {red,blue,yellow,green} = white 83% -- weird

hagen_dogs | 2 months ago

king - man + woman = queen

queen - woman + man = drone

MYEUHD | 2 months ago

Car - Wheel(s) doesn't really have results I'd guess at (boat, sled, etc.). Just specific four wheeled vehicles.

Glyptodon | 2 months ago

doesn’t do anything on my iphone

hello_computer | 2 months ago

London-England+France=Maupassant

Finbel | 2 months ago

King-man+woman=Navratilova, who is apparently a Czech tennis player. Apparently, it's very case-sensitive. Cool idea!

firejake308 | 2 months ago

  car + dragon = panzer
cosmicgadget | 2 months ago

Just use a LLM api to generate results, it will be far better and more accurate than a weird home cooked algorithm

maxcomperatore | 2 months ago

man - courage = husband

darepublic | 2 months ago

Woman + president = man

kylecazar | 2 months ago

male + age = female

female + age = male

zerof1l | 2 months ago

Just inverting the canonical example fails: queen - woman + man = drone

jryb | 2 months ago

doctor - man + woman = medical practitioner

Good to understand this bias before blindly applying these models (Yes- doctor is gender neutral - even women can be doctors!!)

doubtfuluser | 2 months ago

rice + fish = fish meat

rice + fish + raw = meat

hahaha... I JUST WANT SUSHI!

blobbers | 2 months ago

it doesn't know the word human

7373737373 | 2 months ago

twelve-ten+five=

six (84%)

Close enough I suppose

G1N | 2 months ago

potato + microwave = potato tree

bluelightning2k | 2 months ago

man + woman = adult female body

tlhunter | 2 months ago

three + two = four (90%)

downboots | 2 months ago

dog - fur = Aegean civilization (22%)

huh

erulabs | 2 months ago

horse+man

78% male horse 72% horseman

atum47 | 2 months ago

noodle+tomato=pasta

this is pretty fun

adzm | 2 months ago

dog+woman = man

That's weird.

ainiriand | 2 months ago

Now I'm wondering if this could be helpful in doing the NY Times Connections puzzle.

mannykannot | 2 months ago

The app produces nonsense ... such as quantum - superposition = quantum theory !!!

quantum_state | 2 months ago

garden + sin = gardening

hmm...

kataqatsi | 2 months ago

colorless+green+ideas doesn't produce anything of interest, which is disappointing.

woodruffw | 2 months ago

carbon + oxygen = nitrogen

LOL

insane_dreamer | 2 months ago

[dead]

throwaway984393 | 2 months ago

[flagged]

ephou7 | 2 months ago

Can someone explain me what the fuck this is supposed to be!?

ezbie | 2 months ago

cheeseburger-giraffe+space-kidney-monkey = cheesecake

spinarrets | 2 months ago