Amazon explains how Alexa learns new languages

Amazon's Alexa assistant recently learned to speak new languages globally: Hindi, U.S. Spanish, and Brazilian Portuguese. Synthetic data aided substantially in this, explained Amazon senior manager for research science Janet Slifka in a post on the Alexa blog this morning, but it wasn't the end-all-be-all solution. They required new bootstrapping tools. One of the tools in question was developed by Amazon's Alexa AI Applied Modeling and Data Science group, and it uses a technique called grammar induction to analyze so-called golden utterances (i.e., canonical examples of customer requests proposed by Alexa feature teams) and produce a series of expressions that can generate similar sentences. The other -- guided resampling -- creates novel sentences by recombining words and phrases from examples in the available data, with an emphasis on optimizing the volume and distribution of the sentence types.