Data Skeptic

Kyle and Linhda discuss attention and the transformer - an encoder/decoder architecture that extends the basic ideas of vector embeddings like word2vec into a more contextual use case.

When users on Twitter post with geographic tags, it creates the opportunity for a variety of interesting questions to be posed having to do with language, dialects, and location.  In this episode, Kyle interviews Bruno Gonçalves about his work studying language in this way.  

This is an interview with Ellen Loeshelle, Director of Product Management at Clarabridge.  We primarily discuss sentiment analysis.

A gentle introduction to the very high-level idea of "attention" in machine learning, as it will play a major role in some upcoming episodes over the next few weeks.

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