Schedule: Text, Language, and Speech sessions

Delip Rao explores natural language processing with deep learning, walking you through neural network architectures and NLP tasks and teaching you how to apply these architectures for those tasks. Read more.

Technology has opened up access to more information than ever before, but it’s still on humans to turn that data into knowledge. To solve this problem, organizations are turning to AI and natural language processing to augment human analysts. Sean Gourley explores how the world’s largest organizations use AI to summarize thousands of documents and scale human analysts. Read more.

Uber has implemented an ML and NLP system that suggests the most likely solutions to a ticket to its customer support representatives, making them faster and more accurate while providing a better user experience. Piero Molino, Huaixiu Zheng, and Yi-Chia Wang describe how Uber built the system with traditional and deep learning models and share the lessons learned along the way. Read more.

New AI solutions in question answering, chatbots, structured data extraction, text generation, and inference all require deep understanding of the nuances of human language. David Talby shares challenges, risks, and best practices for building NLU-based systems, drawing on examples and case studies from products and services built by Fortune 500 companies and startups over the past six years. Read more.

KC Tung explains why LSTM provides great flexibility to model the consumer touchpoint sequence problem in a way that allows just-in-time insights about an advertising campaign's effectiveness across all touchpoints (channels), empowering advertisers to evaluate, adjust, or reallocate resources or investments in order to maximize campaign effectiveness. Read more.

After a slow start, the finance industry is quickly catching up with others in its adoption of AI. Joe Rothermich explains how Thomson Reuters Labs is using AI to perform research in building quantitative investment models and discusses the company's research in deep learning for credit risk, machine learning and NLP for unlocking alternative datasets, and financial graph-based analytics. Read more.

What if you could QA everything and make your best employees 10–100x more efficient? Ben Taylor shares real use cases of business transformation and realized value in production using deep learning and discusses some of the executive conversations and behaviors Dell EMC is seeing in the market. Read more.

Rachael Rekart offers an overview of Autodesk Virtual Agent (AVA), which has revolutionized the way Autodesk approaches customer service. Customers chat with AVA as they would a human, in natural language, and AVA processes transactions quickly, returns accurate answers, or gathers information to pass to a human counterpart to resolve the query. Read more.

In recent years, there's been a quantum leap in the performance of AI, as deep learning made its mark in areas from speech recognition to machine translation and computer vision. However, as artificial intelligence becomes increasingly popular, data privacy issues also gain traction. Yishay Carmiel reviews these issues and explains how they impact the future of deep learning development. Read more.

Clara’s human-in-the-loop scheduling service combines the precision of machine intelligence and the judgement of an expert team. Jason Laska explores the trade-offs between text annotations defined for fast data entry and those meant solely for training machine learning models, using the application of DateTime text as it pertains to meeting-attendee availability to guide the discussion. Read more.

Much attention in enterprise AI today is focused on automation. Jake Saper explains why the more interesting applications focus on worker augmentation and offers an overview of coaching networks, which gather data from a distributed network of workers and identify the best techniques for getting things done. Read more.

Leveraging structured knowledge will be a critical ingredient in the design of the next wave of intelligent applications. Mike Tung offers an overview of the current open source and commercial knowledge graphs and explains how consumer and business applications are already taking advantage of these to provide intelligent experiences and enhanced business efficiency. Read more.

Deep learning (DL) creates impactful advances following a virtuous recipe: a model architecture search, creating large training datasets, and scaling computation. Joel Hestness discusses research done by Baidu Research's Silicon Valley AI Lab on new model architectures and features for speech recognition (Deep Speech 3), speech generation (Deep Voice 3), and natural language processing. Read more.

AI-powered chatbots are increasingly becoming viable solutions for customer service use cases. Technology leaders must consider adopting a multichannel chatbot strategy to avoid siloed chatbot solutions. Sharad Gupta shares a framework to ensure long-term strategic investment in chatbots. Read more.

Abhishek Tayal offers insight into how Twitter's ML platform team, Cortex, is developing models, related tooling, and infrastructure with the objective of making entity embeddings a first-class citizen within Twitter's ML platform. Abhishek also shares success stories on how developing such an ecosystem increases efficiency and productivity and leads to better outcomes across product ML teams. Read more.

Human trafficking is a form of modern-day slavery. Online sex advertisement activity on portals like Backpage provide important clues that, if harnessed and analyzed at scale, can help resource-strapped law enforcement crack down on trafficking activity. Mayank Kejriwal details an AI architecture called DIG that law enforcement have used (and are using) to combat sex trafficking. Read more.