About this event

Natural language processing (NLP) technology has seen tremendous improvements in recent years but most of these successes have been concentrated in languages with large amounts of data. In this talk, I will discuss challenges and potential solutions on the way to scaling NLP to more of the world’s 7000 languages. In particular, I will highlight recent progress in NLP for African languages and present methods that are applicable to languages with limited data such as employing alternative sources of data and multi-modal information.

Speaker

Sebastian Ruder is a research scientist at Google based in Berlin, Germany working on natural language processing (NLP) for under-represented languages. Before that he was a research scientist at DeepMind. He completed his PhD in Natural Language Processing and Deep Learning at the Insight Research Centre for Data Analytics, while working as a research scientist at Dublin-based text analytics startup AYLIEN.