Data Skeptic

Modern messaging technology has facilitated a trend towards highly compact, short messages send by users who can presume a great amount of context held between the communicating parties. The rules of grammar may be discarded and often visible errors are a normal part of the conversation.

>>> Good mornink

>>> morning

Yet such short messages are also important for businesses whose users are unlikely to read a large block of text upon completing an order. Similarly, a business might want to offer assistance and effective question and answering solutions in an automated and ideally multi-lingual way. In this episode, we discuss techniques for designing solutions like that.

ELMo (Embeddings from Language Models) introduced the idea of deep contextualized word representations. It extends previous ideas like word2vec and GloVe. The ELMo model is a neural network able to map natural language into a vector space. This vector space, out of box, proved to be incredibly useful in a wide variety of seemingly unrelated NLP tasks like sentiment analysis and name entity recognition.

Bilingual evaluation understudy (or BLEU) is a metric for evaluating the quality of machine translation using human translation as examples of acceptable quality results. This metric has become a widely used standard in the research literature. But is it the perfect measure of quality of machine translation?

While at NeurIPS 2018, Kyle chatted with Liang Huang about his work with Baidu research on simultaneous translation, which was demoed at the conference.

Machine transcription (the process of translating audio recordings of language to text) has come a long way in recent years. But how do the errors made during machine transcription compare to the errors made by a human transcriber? Find out in this episode!

A sequence to sequence (or seq2seq) model is neural architecture used for translation (and other tasks) which consists of an encoder and a decoder.

The encoder/decoder architecture has obvious promise for machine translation, and has been successfully applied this way. Encoding an input to a small number of hidden nodes which can effectively be decoded to a matching string requires machine learning to learn an efficient representation of the essence of the strings.

In addition to translation, seq2seq models have been used in a number of other NLP tasks such as summarization and image captioning.

Related Links

• tf-seq2seq

• Describing Multimedia Content using Attention-based Encoder--Decoder Networks

• Show and Tell: A Neural Image Caption Generator

• Attend to You: Personalized Image Captioning with Context Sequence Memory Networks

Kyle interviews Julia Silge about her path into data science, her book Text Mining with R, and some of the ways in which she's used natural language processing in projects both personal and professional.

• https://stack-survey-2018.glitch.me/
• https://stackoverflow.blog/2017/03/28/realistic-developer-fiction/

One of the most challenging NLP tasks is natural language understanding and reasoning. How can we construct algorithms that are able to achieve human level understanding of text and be able to answer general questions about it?

This is truly an open problem, and one with the bAbI dataset has been constructed to facilitate. bAbI presents a variety of different language understanding and reasoning tasks and exists as benchmark for comparing approaches.

In this episode, Kyle talks to Rasmus Berg Palm about his recent paper Recurrent Relational Networks

In the first half of this episode, Kyle speaks with Marc-Alexandre Côté and Wendy Tay about Text World. Text World is an engine that simulates text adventure games. Developers are encouraged to try out their reinforcement learning skills building agents that can programmatically interact with the generated text adventure games.

In the second half of this episode, Kyle interviews Kevin Patel about his paper Towards Lower Bounds on Number of Dimensions for Word Embeddings. In this research, the explore an important question of how many hidden nodes to use when creating a word embedding.

Word2vec is an unsupervised machine learning model which is able to capture semantic information from the text it is trained on. The model is based on neural networks. Several large organizations like Google and Facebook have trained word embeddings (the result of word2vec) on large corpora and shared them for others to use.

The key algorithmic ideas involved in word2vec is the continuous bag of words model (CBOW). In this episode, Kyle uses excerpts from the 1983 cinematic masterpiece War Games, and challenges Linhda to guess a word Kyle leaves out of the transcript. This is similar to how word2vec is trained. It trains a neural network to predict a hidden word based on the words that appear before and after the missing location.