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Talking Tech (and dating) with comedian Norm MacDonald

USATODAY - Tech Top Stories

Comedian Norm MacDonald just co-created a new video dating app, LOKO, but he's not ready to put himself out there on it. "I am not using it," he told USA TODAY this week. MacDonald is best known for his years on Saturday Night Live and sitcoms like The Norm Show. He's got a new gig for Netflix, a talk show called Norm MacDonald Has a Show, debuting on Sept. 14th. The LOKO app came out of a corporate gig, where he met Canadian entrepreneur Vivek Jain, who complained about his lack of success finding dates.


Here are the 5 best Amazon deals you can get right now

USATODAY - Tech Top Stories

I love when Amazon serves up good deals on a Monday. If you make a purchase by clicking one of our links, we may earn a small share of the revenue. However, our picks and opinions are independent from USA Today's newsroom and any business incentives. September is off to a gloomy, chilly start, which is perfect for curling up with a hot cup of whatever, some good background Netflix, and a bit of online window shopping. It's my job to search for the best deals on the best products every day, which is lucky for me because I love sniffing out a bargain.


10 amazing products I didn't think would change my life

USATODAY - Tech Top Stories

If you make a purchase by clicking one of our links, we may earn a small share of the revenue. However, our picks and opinions are independent from USA TODAY's newsroom and any business incentives. I've always loved gadgets and gizmos, especially those that make my life better. And with Shark Tank and Kickstarter and things like that, it seems like you can't go more than a day without learning about some new amazing product to solve some problem or other. Over the years, I've taken chances on lots of snake oil-like products. Some have been complete garbage, like a third-party Alexa-enabled smart speaker that is painfully slow and sounds like crap.


Square Enix survival-shooter 'Left Alive' delayed to 2019

Engadget

Square Enix's mysterious Left Alive project has been pushed back from an ambiguous "2018" release date to February 28th, 2019 in Japan. The delay isn't a huge surprise given how little we've seen of the game. Square Enix did, however, show a new cinematic trailer today during Sony's pre-Tokyo Game Show event. Set in the fictional city of Nova Slava, it follows three characters as they try to endure a futuristic warzone filled with soldiers and mechs. The teaser had no gameplay (boo) but did show some impressive-looking robots sliding around.


Google Case Set to Examine if EU Data Rules Extend Globally

U.S. News

Not all requests are waved through. In a related case that will also be heard Tuesday, the EU court will be asked to weigh in on a request by four people in France who want their search results to be purged of any information about their political beliefs and criminal records, without taking into account public interest. Google had rejected their request, which was ultimately referred to the ECJ.


How clever is the FiLM model, and how clever can it be?

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The FiLM model achieves close-to-perfect performance on the diagnostic CLEVR dataset and is distinguished from other such models by having a comparatively simple and easily transferable architecture. In this paper, we investigate in more detail the ability of FiLM to learn various linguistic constructions. Our main results show that (a) FiLM is not able to learn relational statements straight away except for very simple instances, (b) training on a broader set of instances as well as pretraining on simpler instance types can help alleviate these learning difficulties, (c) mixing is less robust than pretraining and very sensitive to the compositional structure of the dataset. Overall, our results suggest that the approach of big all-encompassing datasets and the paradigm of "the effectiveness of data" may have fundamental limitations.


Multi-label Classification of User Reactions in Online News

arXiv.org Machine Learning

The increase in the number of Internet users and the strong interaction brought by Web 2.0 made the Opinion Mining an important task in the area of natural language processing. Although several methods are capable of performing this task, few use multi-label classification, where there is a group of true labels for each example. This type of classification is useful for situations where the opinions are analyzed from the perspective of the reader. Recently, Deep Learning has been registering the state of the art in several single-label problems. This paper discuss the efficiency of the Long Short-Term Memory compared to traditional multi-label classification approaches. To do that, extensive tests were carried out on two news corpora written in Brazilian Portuguese annotated with reactions. A new corpus called BFRC-PT is presented. In the tests performed, the highest number of correct predictions was obtained with the Classifier Chains method combined with the Random Forest algorithm. When considering the class distribution, the best results were obtained with the Binary Relevance method combined with the LSTM and Random Forest algorithms.


A Transfer-Learnable Natural Language Interface for Databases

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Relational database management systems (RDBMSs) are powerful because they are able to optimize and answer queries against any relational database. A natural language interface (NLI) for a database, on the other hand, is tailored to support that specific database. In this work, we introduce a general purpose transfer-learnable NLI with the goal of learning one model that can be used as NLI for any relational database. We adopt the data management principle of separating data and its schema, but with the additional support for the idiosyncrasy and complexity of natural languages. Specifically, we introduce an automatic annotation mechanism that separates the schema and the data, where the schema also covers knowledge about natural language. Furthermore, we propose a customized sequence model that translates annotated natural language queries to SQL statements. We show in experiments that our approach outperforms previous NLI methods on the WikiSQL dataset and the model we learned can be applied to another benchmark dataset OVERNIGHT without retraining.


Dual Ask-Answer Network for Machine Reading Comprehension

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

There are three modalities in the reading comprehension setting: question, answer and context. The task of question answering or question generation aims to infer an answer or a question when given the counterpart based on context. We present a novel two-way neural sequence transduction model that connects three modalities, allowing it to learn two tasks simultaneously and mutually benefit one another. During training, the model receives question-context-answer triplets as input and captures the cross-modal interaction via a hierarchical attention process. Unlike previous joint learning paradigms that leverage the duality of question generation and question answering at data level, we solve such dual tasks at the architecture level by mirroring the network structure and partially sharing components at different layers. This enables the knowledge to be transferred from one task to another, helping the model to find a general representation for each modality. The evaluation on four public datasets shows that our dual-learning model outperforms the mono-learning counterpart as well as the state-of-the-art joint models on both question answering and question generation tasks.


TVQA: Localized, Compositional Video Question Answering

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Recent years have witnessed an increasing interest in image-based question-answering (QA) tasks. However, due to data limitations, there has been much less work on video-based QA. In this paper, we present TVQA, a large-scale video QA dataset based on 6 popular TV shows. TVQA consists of 152,545 QA pairs from 21,793 clips, spanning over 460 hours of video. Questions are designed to be compositional in nature, requiring systems to jointly localize relevant moments within a clip, comprehend subtitle-based dialogue, and recognize relevant visual concepts. We provide analyses of this new dataset as well as several baselines and a multi-stream end-to-end trainable neural network framework for the TVQA task. The dataset is publicly available at http://tvqa.cs.unc.edu.