eClub will again organize the Summer Camp (ESC). The
ESC 2016 was incredibly successful. Five eClubbers worked on a question answering system YodaQA. At the end of summer, they have entered the
Amazon Alexa Prize competition and got in between top twelve selected for development of a social bot. They received $100k scholarship for a social bot development. Currently, they are busy working on the first version of
Alquist.
We would like to continue in the direction of developing dialog applications in ESC 2017. The social bot task is very challenging, and many required technologies are still in development. While developing YodaQA, we have looked at the well known classical NLP algorithms as well as to new mainly neural networks based ones, such as LSTM, GRU, etc. to process text in many different ways.
It is beginning of March, but we are already prepared to incubate new, eager students interested
joining us on this journey toward smarter systems. We have strong support not only from Amazon but also from the local company Seznam. Seznam is one of the few competing successfully with Google on the domestic market. They are 100% Machine Learning company with a lot of problems of mutual interest.
Here is a sneak preview of the projects for this year. Join us, and work with us tomorrow, if you are interested. We are offering scholarship equivalent to what you would earn working for a company. We are moving to the new CVUT building, it is gorgeous, as soon as it opens, it is just a matter of weeks.
Join us! You can start any time.
Automatic email reply generation
In this project, we want to research methods for automatic generation of short responses to emails or social networks messages. Specifically, on a cell phone, it can be a great advantage to select from a selection of semantically diverse replies. We want first cover few words long messages. The initial steps will include a review of Recurrent Neural Networks architectures and a meaningful training set construction.
Amazon Echo conversational application
We have a set of tasks we would like to cover as a spoken dialog. We want to design interactive conversational bots for Amazon Echo. We want the application to be engaging, entertaining and informative, bringing the user latest news from specific areas, such as sports, celebrities, movies, etc. This project is OK for students who are only entering the field with no or small experience.
Knowledge extraction
There is vast of information on the Internet. A lot of the information is in the form of a text; the information is unstructured. In this project, we want to review the methods for retrieving and extracting the information, learning the dependencies of statements in the texts. We want to create ontologies from a selected, limited content and store the knowledge for further use. These are very challenging problems but do not hesitate to join. We have students currently working on these topics. We know what the first steps are.
Text summarization
Journalists write the Internet news in a particular language, frequently using idioms, slang or infrequent expressions. In this project, we want to extract what is important and create a summary in a clear language. Initially, we want to summarize long sentences. Next, select a suitable method, implement and test it on a chosen domain.
Events Extraction from Text
This project is only an extension of the previous one. We want to design and implement a system for extracting events from the Internet. The primary goal is selecting news messages based on identified topics (or events). Extraction of economic events like mergers & acquisitions, stock splits, dividend announcements, etc., play an essential role in decision making, in risk analysis applications and monitoring systems.
We are finishing the last details, of the Alquist social bot. Today we are opening the first preview for testers. If you are interested, leave your email. We will send you instructions. The total number of testers is limited. Hurry up!