The annual meeting of the North American chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) introduced an industry track in 2018, and at this year's conference, which begins next week, one of the industry track chairs is Amazon principal research scientist Rashmi Gangadharaiah. "The NAACL industry track inspired industry tracks at other conferences such as COLING and EMNLP," Gangadharaiah says. "The industry track provides a forum for researchers in the industry to exchange ideas and discuss successful deployments of ML [machine learning] and NLP [natural-language processing] technologies, as well as share challenges that arise in deploying such systems in real-world settings." For instance, Gangadharaiah explains, "academic research is often done in very controlled settings. It's not a negative thing: people have to do research, and it's useful to start in a controlled setting. But when we put such systems in real-world situations, we typically have to worry about latency, memory, and space. It's not always accuracy that we go for. So I think it makes it more interesting that way."