Suna Bensch and Henrik Björklund gave presentations at the umedev IT conference 2018.
Suna Bensch was one of the keynote speakers, and gave a much appreciated presentation on dialogue systems:
Title: Talking machines (Suna Bensch)
Abstract: Every day we read about how Artificial Intelligence will change our lives, both as individuals and as companies. Predictions like “Natural Language Technology will be as critical to the enterprise of 2020 as their websites are today” can be both alarming and inspirational. In this talk I will give an overview of typical applications of intelligent systems, with a focus on “conversational interfaces”, i.e. computers that communicate by speaking and listening to the users. Such systems become more and more common for customer service, mobile apps, and also in robots. I will describe how conversational interfaces are currently designed, based on a combination of computer science and ad-hoc solutions. Modern approaches using machine learning will also be presented. The presentation will also include a demonstration with our talking robots.
In the developer track, Henrik Björklund gave an introduction to language technology tools.
Title: Kan maskiner förstå svenska? Om semantik, språkteknologi och neurala nät (Henrik Björklund)
Abstract: När vi pratar om artificiell intelligens handlar det ofta om att få datorer att göra saker som vi människor traditionellt är bra på: spela schack, känna igen ansikten, läsa handskriven text och så vidare. Ett väldigt viktigt område där vi människor fortfarande utklassar datorerna är användningen av naturliga språk, alltså språk som svenska och engelska. I den här presentationen utforskar vi några av de tekniker som har bidragit till stora framsteg inom språkteknologin under de senaste åren, till exempel djupa neurala nät, semantiska vektorer och viktade grammatiker.