Media
Natural Language Generation: The Commercial State of the Art in 2020
It took a while, but natural language generation is now an established commercial software category. It's commented upon frequently in both industry media and the mainstream press, and businesses are willing to pay hard cash to take advantage of the technology. We look at who's active in the space, the nature of the technology that's available today, and where things might go in the future. A version of this article will appear in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Natural Language Engineering. If you want to keep up with what's happening in the Natural Language Processing industry, subscribe to This Week in NLP.
Netflix's 'Old Guard' video game contest promises an 83-year subscription
Netflix is holding a gaming tournament for The Old Guard fans, and the winner won't have to pay for a subscription for the rest of their life. To celebrate the launch and to promote the Charlize Theron flick, the streaming giant is hosting a gaming competition featuring an original The Old Guard video game from July 17th through the 19th. Those interested in winning an "immortal" subscription will have to beat everyone else and be #1 by the end of the event this weekend. Okay, so the subscription won't actually last forever, but it'll be good for 1,000 months or 83 years -- if civilization hasn't collapsed yet, Netflix might not even exist by then. Netflix says fans can expect to play a "browser-based, top-down beat'em up video game" that mirrors the events of the film, which is based on a graphic novel by Greg Rucka.
Machine Learning's Obsession with Kids' TV Show Characters
What do they have in common? They're all beloved fictional characters from TV shows many of us watched when we were young. In 2018, researchers at the Allen Institute published the language model ELMo. The lead author, Matt Peters, said the team brainstormed many acronyms for their model, and ELMo instantly stuck as a "whimsical but memorable" choice. What started out as an inside joke has become a full-blown trend.