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. Feel free to forward this to a friend. |
|
|
Alibaba Outdoes Google? While we've been impatiently waiting as Google slowly rolls out Duplex since its gob-smacking demo in May, it appears Alibaba has been powering ahead with a just-as-impressive conversational voice assistant of its own. Demo'd at this week's NeurIPS conference, there's a brief but informative description here. |
|
|
Alexa Prize Winner Since 2016, Amazon has been running an annual 'socialbot challenge' for university teams. This year's winner, Gunrock from the University of California, Davis, earned $500k for its development team. Gunrock maintained conversation for an average of 9 minutes and 59 seconds. There's a further $1M prize for the first system to make it to 20 minutes. |
|
|
'AI and the News' Open Challenge Meanwhile, the New York Times argues that chatbots are a danger to democracy. So you might skip the Alexa Prize and instead consider the $750k on offer here. Ah, the deadline for submissions has already passed; but it's worth checking out the ideas pitched by the just-announced finalists, a fair number of which are concerned with addressing the problem of fake news. |
|
|
Open the Pod Bay Doors, CIMON Pronounced 'Simon', CIMON is an embodied floating chatbot aboard the International Space Station, co-developed by IBM and Airbus. Check out this write-up and video: not as impressive as Google Duplex, but there's probably not much call for making hair appointments or restaurant bookings in space. [Hey, Elon, are you listening?] |
|
|
Got this from someone else? |
|
|
Did you enjoy this newsletter? if so, you might forward it to a friend; or you could email us at news@language-technology.com to tell us what you want more of. Did you hate this newsletter? if so, you could forward it to an enemy; or you could email us at news@language-technology.com to tell us why – make it better! Back issues are available here. |
|
|
|
|