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Computers are capable of many impressive feats, but making you laugh is usually not one of them. Or could it be? This episode will talk about a custom-built machine learning algorithm that searches through text and writes jokes based on what it finds. 

The jokes are formulaic: they're all of the form "I like my X like I like my Y: Z" where X and Y are nouns, and Z is an adjective that can describe both X and Y. For (dumb) example, "I like my men like I like my coffee: steaming hot." The joke is funny when ZX and ZY are both very common phrases, but X and Y are rarely seen together. 

So, given a large enough corpus of text, the algorithm looks for triplets of words that fit this description and writes jokes based on them. Are the jokes funny? You be the judge...

http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/s0894589/petrovic13unsupervised.pdf

Computers Try to Tell Jokes

A true classic topic in ML: Facial recognition is very high-dimensional, meaning that each picture can have millions of pixels, each of which can be a single feature. It's computationally expensive to deal with all these features, and invites overfitting problems. PCA (principal components analysis) is a classic dimensionality reduction tool that compresses these many dimensions into the few that contain the most variation in the data, and those principal components are often then fed into a classic ML algorithm like and SVM. 

One of the best thing about eigenfaces is the great example code that you can find in sklearn--you can distinguish pictures of world leaders yourself in just a few minutes!

http://scikit-learn.org/stable/auto_examples/applications/face_recognition.html

Facial Recognition with Eigenfaces

So, um... what about machine learning for audio applications?  In the course of starting this podcast, we've edited out a lot of "um"'s from our raw audio files.  It's gotten now to the point that, when we see the waveform in soundstudio, we can almost identify an "um" by eye.  Which makes it an interesting problem for machine learning--is there a way we can train an algorithm to recognize the "um" pattern, too?  This has become a little side project for Katie, which is very much still a work in progress.  We'll talk about what's been accomplished so far, some design choices Katie made in getting the project off the ground, and (of course) mistakes made and hopefully corrected.  We always say that the best way to learn something is by doing it, and this is our chance to try our own machine learning project instead of just telling you about what someone else did! 

Um Detector 1

The reason that neural nets are taking over the world right now is because they can be efficiently trained with the backpropagation algorithm.  In short, backprop allows you to adjust the weights of the neural net based on how good of a job the neural net is doing at classifying training examples, thereby getting better and better at making predictions.  In this episode: we talk backpropagation, and how it makes it possible to train the neural nets we know and love.

Backpropagation

In this episode we briefly say what we're up to with the podcast.  No technical content, just a description of what each episode will look like, and why we're doing this.

00 - Intro to the podcast

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/A-Comparative-Study-of-Word-Embeddings-for-Reading-Dhingra-Liu/3ec37205c9201fc891ab51da200e361fdc34bfb3

01 - A Comparative Study of Word Embeddings for Reading Comprehension

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Bidirectional-Attention-Flow-for-Machine-Seo-Kembhavi/007ab5528b3bd310a80d553cccad4b78dc496b02

02 - Bidirectional Attention Flow for Machine Comprehension

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/FastQA-A-Simple-and-Efficient-Neural-Architecture-Weissenborn-Wiese/7c1576b96a1e246d77b30f7b80cec63be96fa698

03 - FastQA: A Simple and Efficient Neural Architecture for Question Answering

An interview with Chris Dyer.

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Recurrent-Neural-Network-Grammars-Dyer-Kuncoro/1594d954abc650bce2db445c52a76e49655efb0c

04 - Recurrent Neural Network Grammars, with Chris Dyer

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Transition-Based-Dependency-Parsing-with-Stack-Lon-Dyer-Ballesteros/396b7932beac62a72288eaea047981cc9a21379a

05 - Transition-Based Dependency Parsing with Stack Long Short-Term Memory

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Design-Challenges-for-Entity-Linking-Ling-Singh/aa2a7ac7bfa9a0201d4faddd4e7bb26299a5e0be

06 - Design Challenges for Entity Linking

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Capturing-Semantic-Similarity-for-Entity-Linking-w-Francis-Landau-Durrett/1c9aca60f7ac5edcceb73d612806704a7d662643

07 - Capturing Semantic Similarity for Entity Linking with Convolutional Neural Networks

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Learning-to-Generate-Reviews-and-Discovering-Senti-Radford-Jozefowicz/664ec878de4b7170712baae4a7821fc2602bba25

https://blog.openai.com/unsupervised-sentiment-neuron/

09 - Learning to Generate Reviews and Discovering Sentiment

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Question-Answering-from-Unstructured-Text-by-Retri-Watanabe-Dhingra/89d06c2996f379c602e64b4243f026cd164400d7

13 - Question Answering from Unstructured Text by Retrieval and Comprehension

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Generalizing-to-Unseen-Entities-and-Entity-Pairs-w-Verga-Neelakantan/7dd8b958632b07e41979337c71d847a3f39df456

18 - Generalizing to Unseen Entities and Entity Pairs with Row-less Universal Schema

ACL 2017 short paper, by Jonathan Herzig and Jonathan Berant.

This is a nice, obvious-in-hindsight paper that applies a frustratingly-easy-domain-adaptation-like approach to semantic parsing, similar to the multi-task semantic dependency parsing approach we talked to Noah Smith about recently.  Because there is limited training data available for complex logical constructs (like argmax, or comparatives), but the mapping from language onto these constructions is typically constant across domains, domain adaptation can give a nice, though somewhat small, boost in performance.

NB: I felt like I struggled a bit with describing this clearly.  Not my best episode.  Hopefully it's still useful.

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Neural-Semantic-Parsing-over-Multiple-Knowledge-ba-Herzig-Berant/6611cf821f589111adfc0a6fbb426fa726f4a9af

25 - Neural Semantic Parsing over Multiple Knowledge-bases

**The podcast is currently on hiatus. For more active NLP content, check out the Holistic Intelligence Podcast linked below.**

Welcome to the NLP highlights podcast, where we invite researchers to talk about their work in various areas in natural language processing. All views expressed belong to the hosts/guests, and do not represent their employers.

18 - Generalizing to Unseen Entities and Entity Pairs with Row-less Universal Schema

NLP Highlights