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Probabilistic and Causal Inference: The work of Judea Pearl (ACM Books)2020Judea Pearl argues that people as well as machines with artificial intelligence must use causal reasoning to make decisions and to explain or justify those decisions. We wholeheartedly agree with Judea on this point, but show that the ability to identify available alternatives and the ability to express preferences are also necessary for making and explaining decisions. We briefly review the basic principles
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Journal of Machine Learning Research2020With the growing importance of machine learning (ML) algorithms for practical applications, reducing data quality problems in ML pipelines has become a major focus of research. Ensuring completeness of a data source is one of the most impactful data quality challenges: in many use cases, missing values can break data pipelines. Current missing value imputation methods are focusing on numerical or categorical
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AAAI 2020, AI Magazine2020Today, most of the large-scale conversational AI agents such as Alexa, Siri, or Google Assistant are built using manually annotated data to train the different components of the system including automatic speech recognition (ASR), natural language understanding (NLU), and entity resolution (ER). Typically, the accuracy of the machine learning models in these components are improved by manually transcribing
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AAAI 20192019In this paper, we propose an approach for transferring the knowledge of a neural model for sequence labeling, learned from the source domain, to a new model trained on a target domain, where new label categories appear. Our transfer learning (TL) techniques enable to adapt the source model using the target data and new categories, without accessing to the source data. Our solution consists in adding new
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ACL 20192019We present methods for multi-task learning that take advantage of natural groupings of related tasks. Task groups may be defined along known properties of the tasks, such as task domain or language. Such task groups represent supervised information at the inter-task level and can be encoded into the model. We investigate two variants of neural network architectures that accomplish this, learning different
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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. -
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.
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February 27, 2019To ensure that Alexa Prize contestants can concentrate on dialogue systems — the core technology of socialbots — Amazon scientists and engineers built a set of machine learning modules that handle fundamental conversational tasks and a development environment that lets contestants easily mix and match existing modules with those of their own design.
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January 30, 2019Many of today’s most popular AI systems are, at their core, classifiers. They classify inputs into different categories: this image is a picture of a dog, not a cat; this audio signal is an instance of the word “Boston”, not the word “Seattle”; this sentence is a request to play a video, not a song. But what happens if you need to add a new class to your classifier — if, say, someone releases a new type of automated household appliance that your smart-home system needs to be able to control?
