Amazon at ACL 2018

Last month, Amazon Alexa AI science leader Young-Bum Kim wrote a blog post about a paper he's presenting at the annual conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), which describes the first part of the two-part system that will enable Alexa to select the one skill out of thousands that's best suited to a particular customer request. He described the second part in a paper presented at a meeting of the North American chapter of the ACL, which was under way at the time. ACL begins in Melbourne, Australia on July 15, and in addition to Kim, two other Amazon AI researchers are coauthors of papers accepted to the conference. Anima Anandkumar, a principal scientist in Amazon's Rekognition and Video group, and colleagues at Cornell University will present a new technique for producing word embeddings, which attempt to mathematically capture words' semantic similarities. And Alessandro Moschitti, a principal scientist in Amazon's Machine Translation/Natural Language Processing group, is coauthor on a pair of papers that use innovative machine-learning systems for classifying discussion-forum threads as a springboard for addressing some more general problems.