10 Exciting Ideas of 2018 in NLP

This post gathers 10 ideas that I found exciting and impactful this year--and that we'll likely see more of in the future. For each idea, I will highlight 1-2 papers that execute them well. I tried to keep the list succinct, so apologies if I did not cover all relevant work. The list is necessarily subjective and covers ideas mainly related to transfer learning and generalization. Most of these (with some exceptions) are not trends (but I suspect that some might become more'trendy' in 2019).