Why Lexical Problems are the Key to NLP: An Interview with Researcher Vered Shwartz Lionbridge AI

Vered Shwartz is a final year PhD student researching lexical semantic relations in the Natural Language Processing lab at Bar-Ilan University. In between her studies, she has also worked on natural language processing as part of the R&D teams at Google and IBM. Away from the lab, Vered is the creative mind behind Probably Approximately a Scientific Blog, where she discusses key NLP concepts for a general audience. We sat down with her to discuss a range of AI topics, from the lexical problems causing a buzz in the academic community to where she gets her training data. Lionbridge AI: What was it that led you to specialize in NLP? Vered: I took two NLP courses as an undergrad and when I decided to do my Masters it was an easy answer to "what's the most interesting field in computer science I've been exposed to so far?".