Maluuba uses Harry Potter to improve artificial language comprehension - Cantech Letter

Machine learning company Maluuba, with headquarters in Waterloo, Ontario and a research office in Montreal, has applied an algorithm to the text of J.K. Rowling's bestselling novel Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, along with several hundred other children's stories, to read text in such a way that it can then answer questions afterward. Maluuba has also just announced the opening of an R&D lab in Montreal, staffed by Yoshua Bengio of the Université de Montréal's Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (MILA) in partnership with reinforcement learning expert Richard Sutton from the Alberta Innovates Centre for Machine Learning, to make advances in the fields of Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and artificial intelligence (AI). Taking a deep learning approach, Maluuba trained its algorithm to approach the Harry Potter text from several levels of textual abstraction, word, sentence, paragraph, etc. And while a certain contingent of tech utopians may very well look at Maluuba's case study as the smoking gun they need for shutting down Humanities departments in universities everywhere, the company itself makes clear that using an algorithm to comprehend literature is a stepping stone to more practical uses. "For a computer to understand humans speaking in natural language and respond appropriately, it needs to capture and represent a large amount of knowledge that is not just words, but also common sense and context about the topic being discussed by the human," said Maluuba cofounder & CEO Sam Pasupalak. "Maluuba is working with leading experts and the world's premiere academic center for deep learning to design systems that can represent knowledge and answer questions in natural language.