This Week in NLP

Week ending Friday 11th January 2019.

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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The Proliferation of Smart Devices

More than 100 million Alexa devices have now been sold, and Baidu’s DuerOS is said to be on 200 million devices. But Google Assistant tops them all: the company reports that it will soon be on 1 billion devices.  Nothing is off-limits: these days you can use voice interaction with everything from cooking pots to potties.

What’s Coming in Google Assistant in 2019 

Google announced a host of new features for Google Assistant at CES 2019, including flight check-ins and an interpreter mode for real-time translation.  Check out the 10 minute high-level video interview with director of product management Chris Turkstra, or the useful summary of features provided by TechCrunch. 

Translation News 

A number of other players announced translation products at CES.  iFLYTEK's Translator 2.0 supports translations between Chinese and 51 other languages; and Timekettle's WT2 Plus translating earbuds work with any Android or iOS smartphone, leaning on Google and Microsoft for translation tech.

Sogou Ranks First in Conversational QA

Chinese search engine Sogou also announced some translation tech at CES, but perhaps more interesting is their ranking first in the Stanford CoQA challenge.  The company claims that the technology is already in use in Sogou Mingyi, a diagnosing assistant that imitates patient-doctor conversations, and Sogou Lawyer, a legal search service.

Interviews with Voice Innovators

Voicebot.ai has published a podcast of eight interviews with reps of voice companies exhibiting at CES.  They've also released an interesting crowd-sourced set of predictions for voice in 2019.

But wait, there's more ...

 

1.  Acknowledging its belatedness, the New York Times has published an obituary of Karen Spärck Jones, a founding figure in NLP and Information Retrieval who passed away in 2007.

2.  IBM has launched Project Debater, a tool which collects arguments, evaluates them, and tries to produce a concise argument of its own.

3.  Wikipedia has announced a collaboration with Google that integrates Google Translate into Wikipedia's authoring tools.

4.  Amazon's Alexa will now be part of Telenav’s in-car navigation systems. 

5.  ... and Cybic announced the first Alexa-enabled bike.

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