14 NLP Research Breakthroughs You Can Apply To Your Business

Language understanding is a challenge for computers. Subtle nuances of communication that human toddlers can understand still confuse the most powerful machines. Even though advanced techniques like deep learning can detect and replicate complex language patterns, machine learning models still lack fundamental conceptual understanding of what our words really mean. That said, 2018 did yield a number of landmark research breakthroughs which pushed the fields of natural language processing, understanding, and generation forward. We summarized 14 research papers covering several advances in natural language processing (NLP), including high-performing transfer learning techniques, more sophisticated language models, and newer approaches to content understanding. There are hundreds more papers in NLP, NLU, and NLG which we have not covered in this summary, but we hope for this article to give you a solid foundational understanding of the key papers of 2018.