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.

The ACL 2018 conference invites the submission of long and short papers on substantial, original, and unpublished research in all aspects of Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing. As in recent years, some of the presentations at the conference will be of papers accepted by the Transactions of the ACL journal. ACL 2018 adopts the new policies for submission, review, and citation. Submissions that violate any of these policies will be rejected without review. Most importantly, the policies refer to the anonymity period, which starts at January 22nd, 2018 for ACL 2018.