Natural Language Processing (NLP) Talk

Based on the strong interest in data science events held at the AUA College of Science and Engineering, technical minds from Yerevan’s data science and machine learning community were inspired to put more focus on one set of problems, specifically technology for language.

The speakers at the event bring experience from working with technology for language at PicsArt, Google, local and international research institutions, and early-stage startups.  The technologists will be joined by distinguished minds in the fields of Armenian literature and translation for a concluding panel discussion on developing quality content and tools for the Armenian language.

The talk will touch on the nature and scale of human language on the web as it grows beyond three billion users, software internationalization, and interesting players in technology for language, both worldwide and in Armenia.  The core topic of the forum is known as natural language processing (NLP).

The field of natural language processing combines computer science and computational linguistics to solve problems in natural language understanding, search, speech recognition, optical character recognition, topic tagging, sentiment analysis of text, automatic spelling correction, translation, and transliteration.

The hardest problems in NLP, like natural language understanding and translation, are traditional interests of the artificial intelligence community.  The continued growth of data and processing power also have implications for the field. The speakers will discuss how revolutions in machine learning – like neural networks – are driving recent advances in NLP. 

The first Forum on Technology for Language will be held at 17:00 on Saturday, December 12th at the American University of Armenia, and is open to the public.

Agenda

17:00 The Nature of Language in Technology
We take an overview of which language problems are important, and how technologists and language experts solve them.

17:30 What’s New in Natural Language Processing
Research insiders talk about research trends and new techniques, like the deep learning revolution, and new problems and opportunities as users, data and processing power continue to grow.

18:00 Real-World Language Hacking
Language hackers demo industrial-strength tools and datasets, analyze interesting startups with language technology at their core, and introduce local players innovating in NLP.

18:30 Panel: The Future of the Armenian Language
The future brings challenges and opportunities for Armenian. How can we grow high-quality Armenian content? How can we make technology for Armenian work beautifully?

This forum is open to the public.