This Week in NLP

Week ending Friday 2nd November 2018.

Brought to you by The Language Technology Group.

Another week's over.  Did you keep up with your Twitter feed?  Did you catch up on all those blogs?  No?  Well, we did, so you can relax: here are the key happenings this week in the world of Natural Language Processing that we think are worth knowing about. 

 

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Conversica Raises $31 million

Conversica, a conversational UI company focussed on sales lead conversion, has announced a further $31M in funding.  This video demo of the tech on You Tube is quite informative. You can also sign up for a live demo on the company's website, although it appears that's still delivered by a human.

Robo-writing hits Hollywood 

In this 6.5 minute video, the dialog for one of the characters is created using a deep learning model trained on film scripts and customer service interactions.  And a paper by Facebook at this week's EMNLP conference, which describes a large-scale dataset for video description, has attracted media attention. Screenwriters shouldn't give up their day jobs just yet, but one day soon ...

Another Speech Rec Record 

Just over a year ago, Microsoft claimed that its speech recognition had achieved parity with humans, with a word error rate of 5.1% on the Switchboard corpus.  Now China-based CloudWalk Technology has announced a word error rate of 2.97%. 

Has Facebook Lost its Voice?

When Facebook's Portal – a competitor to Amazon's Echo Show – was announced last month, there was some surprise that its voice recognition was powered by Amazon's Alexa, rather than making use of in-house technology.  This short piece in Forbes has some interesting background and analysis.

Speech in a Vacuum

Courtesy of Google's new collaboration with iRobot, you can now tell your robot vacuum cleaner to go clean the bedroom.  Interestingly, Google claims not to be accessing the spatial data maintained by the Roomba, so you (and others) won't be able to see the layout of your house on Google Maps just yet.

But wait, there's more ...

 

Veripol claims to identify false police statements with 80% accuracy.

This week's dog food:  you can now rate Alexa skills using your voice.

Neo4j, a knowledge graph startup, has raised $80 million.

'Ok Google, drill three holes':  voice activation comes to machine tools.

NLP used to detect Chinese policy priority changes.

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