Earlier this year, Facebook put out a call for research proposals centered around natural language processing, or the study of linguistics and AI regarding computer language. Now, it announces which proposals won, and it seems as though the scope of the project is wider than previously thought: the social media platform has found the AI Language Research Consortium.
Facebook revealed in a recent blog post that the Consortium will work to “advance priority research areas” in natural language processing.
The group will go after representation learning, content understanding, dialog systems, information extraction, sentiment analysis, summarization, data collection and cleaning, and speech translation.
Members of the group will be funded for research, collaborate with Facebook researchers, participate in a yearly workshop, and be permitted entry to a number of other natural language processing-related events.
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“These research awards in NLP and machine translation were launched as a continuation of our long-term goal of supporting open research within the NLP community and strengthening collaboration between Facebook and academia,” says Facebook in the blog post.
“Facebook believes strongly in open science, and we hope the consortium, as well as these research awards in NLP and machine translation, will help accelerate research in the NLP community.”
Answer to Alexa Fund?
VentureBeat says the AI Language Research Consortium could be an answer to Amazon’s Alexa Fund, which provides venture capital for voice technology research.
“But the consortium’s mission appears to be more platform-agnostic than Amazon’s efforts — at least on its face. In that respect, it’s somewhat akin to “AI for good” programs like the grant portion of Google’s AI for Social Good, which provides funding to researchers applying at to solve some of the world’s toughest challenges, and Microsoft’s $125 million initiative targeting AI applications in ecology, accessibility, humanitarian action, and cultural heritage.” — VentureBeat
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