Polyglot AI: The Role of Natural Language Processing (NLP) | Rama Akkiraju | WiDS 2020

Rama Akkiraju, IBM Fellow and Director of AI Operations at IBM, delivers a Technical Vision Talk at WiDS Stanford University on March 2, 2020:

AI applications are proliferating in consumer and business domains these days around the world. Have you ever wondered how Siri, Google Home, Google Maps or Amazon Echo speaks to users in different countries in their local languages? How does an automated customer support chat bot that you are speaking with or texting with speak or understand your local language to resolve your problems? AI models that power these applications have to speak the language of the user and the language of the business for them to be useful and relevant. Polyglot AI is not magic just the way AI itself is not magic! It takes a lot of hard work to teach AI to understand and speak new languages. In this talk, I’ll take you through some behind the scenes hard work to build multilingual natural language processing systems that enables AI to speak multiple languages.