Jun 17, 2020

9 Posts

Speech bubble with binary code inside
Jun 17, 2020

The Batch: NLP Special Issue! Powerful techniques from Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce

I’m thrilled to announce our new Natural Language Processing Specialization! Courses 1 and 2 are available on Coursera. We expect to release Courses 3 and 4 soon.
Illustration of Noam Shazeer
Jun 17, 2020

AI Transformed: A Conversation with Transformer co-inventor Noam Shazeer

Noam Shazeer helped spark the latest NLP revolution. He developed the multi-headed self-attention mechanism described in “Attention Is All You Need,” the 2017 paper that introduced the transformer network.
Illustration of a broken heart with a smirk in the middle
Jun 17, 2020

Outing Hidden Hatred: How Facebook built a hate speech detector

Facebook uses automated systems to block hate speech, but hateful posts can slip through when seemingly benign words and pictures combine to create a nasty message. The social network is tackling this problem by enhancing AI’s ability to recognize context.
Illustration of Amazon Alexa with a question mark inside of a thought bubble
Jun 17, 2020

What Were We Talking About?: How Amazon's Alexa keeps up with conversations

Conversational agents have a tough job following the zigs and zags of human conversation. They’re getting better at it — thanks to yesterday’s technology. Amazon recently improved the Alexa chatbot’s ability to identify the current topic of conversation.
Illustration of two translators on a scale
Jun 17, 2020

Choosing Words Carefully: BLUERT trains language models to be better translators.

The words “big” and “large” have similar meanings, but they aren’t always interchangeable: You wouldn’t refer to an older, male sibling as your “large brother” (unless you meant to be cheeky). Choosing among words with similar meanings is critical in language tasks like translation.
Illustration of a doctor and a nurse
Jun 17, 2020

Gender Bender: Double-Hard Debias helps lessen gender bias in NLP models.

AI learns human biases: In word vector space, “man is to computer programmer as woman is to homemaker,” as one paper put it. New research helps language models unlearn such prejudices.
Talking bubbles inside talking bubbles
Jun 17, 2020

Bigger is Better: A research summary of Microsoft's Turing-NLG language model.

Natural language processing lately has come to resemble an arms race, as the big AI companies build models that encompass ever larger numbers of parameters. Microsoft recently held the record — but not for long.
Illustration of two people talking with a typo
Jun 17, 2020

Found in Translation: Apple's method to identify a language from a few words

Language models can’t correct your misspellings or suggest the next word in a text without knowing what language you’re using. For instance, if you type “tac-,” are you aiming for “taco,” a hand-held meal in Spanish, or “taca,” a crown in Turkish?
Speech bubble with binary code inside
Jun 17, 2020

Introducing the Natural Language Processing Specialization

I’m thrilled to announce our new Natural Language Processing Specialization! Courses 1 and 2 are available on Coursera. We expect to release Courses 3 and 4 soon. NLP is reshaping daily life.

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