[July 27, 2017] |
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Voicebox Announces Pioneering Work in AI to Streamline Development Process and Improve User Experience
AI techniques such as semantic parsing hold the promise of
revolutionizing natural language processing. However acquiring training
data for each domain in each supported language remains cumbersome and
expensive. This limitation has become increasingly significant as
companies demand intelligent, conversational voice applications to
support their global product strategies.
Today, the Voicebox Advanced Technologies Team announced a significant
innovation that reduces the burden of data collection while producing
impressive, industry-leading results. More importantly, the innovation
helps overcome the challenge of parsing multi-language utterances, known
in linguistic circles as "code-switching."
Voicebox's approach applies the 'learning' of one language to another.
The team evaluated utterances in German, English and a mix of both in a
single utterance. They developed a neural network model, trained on both
English- and German-only sentences. As part of a single semantic parsing
process, this model transfers information from one language to the
other, thus leveraging English data to reduce the amount of data needed
for German.
As a result, performance on each language improved, yielding
state-of-the-art accuracy comparable to the likes of Google (News - Alert). The team
also evaluated utterances that could contain a mix of both languages and
weren't in any of the training data. Results were similarly impressive.
"We are excited to present this innovation at CoNLL," said Dr. Phil
Cohen, Chief Scientist, AI at Voicebox. "And we're more excited about
the ground-breaking benefits this innovation brings to users." To date,
voice navigation systems, for example, have struggled with multi-lingual
use cases. This has been a serious usability issue in multi-language
regions, such as Europe or Asia where code-switching is common. For
example, a French person driving in Germany may say, "Wie viele
Universitäten ont Paris?" (How many universities does Paris have?)
Similarly, it is very common for a person in China to ask, "???? Let
It Be." (Play the song Let It Be)
"At the end of the day," Cohen added, "the goal of Voicebox Advanced
Technologies research is to bring practical value and a better
experience to users."
If you'd like to read more on the Multilingual Semantic Parsing and
Code-switching, please visit: http://aclweb.org/anthology/K17-1038.
About Voicebox - Voicebox provides award-winning voice technology
for the automotive, mobile, home and IoT markets. It employs patented
Context Management and is an early pioneer in Conversational Artificial
Intelligence. Shipping in 23 languages across six continents, Voicebox's
flagship customers include Toyota and Samsung (News - Alert). Headquartered in
Bellevue, WA, the Company has offices in Asia, Australia and Europe. See http://www.voicebox.com.
View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20170727006725/en/
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