This Week in NLP

Week ending Friday 7th December 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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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?]

AI for Accessibility

Microsoft has been doing a lot of good work recently in terms of providing access to technology for people with disabilities.  We've mentioned before the neat Seeing AI application; now the company has announced automatic transcription and translation of PowerPoint presentations and Skype calls.

But wait, there's more ...

 

1. Ambiverse, one of the text analytics APIs covered in our consumer report, has gone open source.

2. Luminoso, a Massachusetts-based text analytics provider, has raised $10M in Series B funding.

3. New startup Speeko has an app that aims to help improve your public speaking.

4. Textract, a new service from Amazon, extracts text and data from scanned documents. 

5. Huawei's StorySign converts text in children's books to sign language.

Text Analytics APIs | Language Technology Group

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