Facebook founds AI Language Research Consortium to solve challenges in natural language processing

Roughly three months ago, Facebook launched calls for research proposals in three subfields of natural language processing (NLP), the cross-disciplinary study of linguistics and AI concerned with computer-language interactions. It specifically sought "robust" deep learning approaches for NLP and computationally efficient NLP in addition to neural machine translation for low-resource dialects, ultimately in the pursuit of advancing cutting-edge research in machine translation. That was just the start, it would seem. In a blog post today announcing 11 winning proposals among the 115 submitted from 35 countries, Facebook announced the AI Language Research Consortium, a community of partners it says will "work together to advance priority research areas" in NLP. Details were tough to come by at press time, but Facebook says the newly formed group will foster collaboration to tackle challenging tasks like representation learning, content understanding, dialog systems, information extraction, sentiment analysis, summarization, data collection and cleaning, and speech translation.