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NAACL 20182018The end-to-end nature of neural machine translation (NMT) removes many ways of manually guiding the translation process that were available in older paradigms. Recent work, however, has introduced a new capability: lexically constrained or guided decoding, a modification to beam search that forces the inclusion of pre-specified words and phrases in the output. However, while theoretically sound, existing
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NAACL 20182018In this paper we introduce the notion of Demand-Weighted Completeness, allowing estimation of the completeness of a knowledge base with respect to how it is used. Defining an entity by its classes, we employ usage data to predict the distribution over relations for that entity. For example, instances of person in a knowledge base may require a birth date, name and nationality to be considered complete.
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NAACL 20182018Word embedding is a key component in many downstream applications in processing natural languages. Existing approaches often assume the existence of a large collection of text for learning effective word embedding. However, such a corpus may not be available for some low-resource languages. In this paper, we study how to effectively learn a word embedding model on a corpus with only a few million tokens
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NAACL 20182018Fast expansion of natural language functionality of intelligent virtual agents is critical for achieving engaging and informative interactions. However, developing accurate models for new natural language domains is a time and data intensive process. We propose efficient deep neural network architectures that maximally re-use available resources through transfer learning. Our methods are applied for expanding
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SLT 20182018Accurate prediction of conversation topics can be a valuable signal for creating coherent and engaging dialog systems. In this work, we focus on context-aware topic classification methods for identifying topics in free-form human-chatbot dialogs. We extend previous work on neural topic classification and unsupervised topic keyword detection by incorporating conversational context and dialog act features
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April 1, 2019The idea of using arrays of microphones to improve automatic speech recognition (ASR) is decades old. The acoustic signal generated by a sound source reaches multiple microphones with different time delays. This information can be used to create virtual directivity, emphasizing a sound arriving from a direction of interest and diminishing signals coming from other directions. In voice recognition, one of the more popular methods for doing this is known as “beamforming”. -
Animation by Nick LittleMarch 28, 2019Audio watermarking is the process of adding a distinctive sound pattern — undetectable to the human ear — to an audio signal to make it identifiable to a computer. It’s one of the ways that video sites recognize copyrighted recordings that have been posted illegally. To identify a watermark, a computer usually converts a digital file into an audio signal, which it processes internally.
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March 21, 2019Sentiment analysis is the attempt, computationally, to determine from someone’s words how he or she feels about something. It has a host of applications, in market research, media analysis, customer service, and product recommendation, among other things. Sentiment classifiers are typically machine learning systems, and any given application of sentiment analysis may suffer from a lack of annotated data for training purposes.
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March 20, 2019Although deep neural networks have enabled accurate large-vocabulary speech recognition, training them requires thousands of hours of transcribed data, which is time-consuming and expensive to collect. So Amazon scientists have been investigating techniques that will let Alexa learn with minimal human involvement, techniques that fall in the categories of unsupervised and semi-supervised learning.
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March 11, 2019In experiments involving sound recognition, technique reduces error rate by 15% to 30%.
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March 5, 2019The 2018 Alexa Prize featured eight student teams from four countries, each of which adopted distinctive approaches to some of the central technical questions in conversational AI. We survey those approaches in a paper we released late last year, and the teams themselves go into even greater detail in the papers they submitted to the latest Alexa Prize Proceedings. Here, we touch on just a few of the teams’ innovations.
