There is an unnecessary drama unfolding on Twitter on “the war” between connectionists and symbolists. This drama is absurd and perpetuated by people whose relevance exists only in the discussion of the “difference” and the “war.” Most of us who are too busy learning or doing, happily occupy the liminal space between symbolism and connectionism. […]
Joining AI Foundation
TL;DR: I am joining AI Foundation to help build uncanny content generation and detection systems A few friends and family knew this, but today, I am excited to announce widely that I joined the AI Foundation as their VP of Research. I am overseeing their deep learning/machine learning research roadmaps in speech, language, and vision for […]
When OpenAI tried to build more than a Language Model
If you were part of the machine learning Twitter, last Thursday, it was impossible to miss OpenAI’s press release of their new GPT-2 model and all the heated Twitter conversation about that. Many people tried to summarize it in their own ways. A lot of these posts are of “He said, She said” flavor. While […]
The Real Problems with Neural Machine Translation
TLDR: No! Your Machine Translation Model is not “prophesying”, but let’s look at the six major issues with neural machine translation (NMT). So I saw a Twitter thread today with the editor-in-chief of Motherboard tweeting, “Google Translate is popping out bizarre religious texts and no one is sure why“. This post in response to that. I […]
Design Patterns for Production NLP Systems
This post is an excerpt from the final chapter of our upcoming book on Deep Learning and NLP with PyTorch. The book is still a draft under review so your comments on this section are appreciated! Production NLP systems can be complex. When building an NLP system, it is important to remember that the system […]
Differentiable Dynamic Programs and SparseMAP Inference
Two exciting NLP papers at ICML 2018! ICML 2018 accepts are out, and I am excited about two papers that I will briefly outline here. I think both papers are phenomenally good and will bring back structured prediction in NLP to modern deep learning architectures. Differentiable Dynamic Programming for Structured Prediction and Attention Arthur Mensch […]
When Men and Women talk to Siri
Just adding a short note to elaborate on the Twitter conversation I recently had on differential error rates in speech products for male and female speakers. This is not a commentary on Siri; I am using Siri in the title as eponymous to voice assistants in general. TLDR: different gender error rates for speech products […]
Everything is a Model
TLDR: I review a recent systems paper from Google, why it is a wake-up call to the industry, and the recipe it provides for nonlinear product thinking. Here, I will be enumerating my main takeaways from a recent paper, “The Case for Learned Index Structures” by Tim Kraska, Alex Beutel, Ed Chi, Jeffrey Dean, and […]
Two Recent Results in Transfer Learning for Music and Speech
In this post, I want to highlight two recent complementary results on transfer learning applied to audio — one related to music, another related to speech. The first paper, related to music, is by Keunwoo Choi and friends, which incidentally also won the best paper award at ISMIR 2017. But that’s not the only reason […]
When (not) to use Deep Learning for NLP
We are preparing for the second edition of our PyTorch-based Deep Learning for NLP training. It’s a two-day affair, crammed with a lot of learning and hands-on model building where we get to play the intricate dance of introducing the topics from the ground up while still making sure folks are not far from the […]