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Maluuba Partners with McGill University Teach Common Sense to Machines

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malby Angela Guess

A recent press release reports, “MALUUBA, a Canadian deep-learning company helping machines think, reason and communicate with human-like intelligence, today announced that it is partnering with McGill University’s Reasoning and Learning Lab to teach machines to understand common sense, a complex and challenging aspect of natural language understanding. Since opening its deep learning lab in Montreal in January, Maluuba has been building the largest deep learning lab focused on natural language understanding in North America. Through this partnership, Maluuba will collaborate with Dr. Jackie CK Cheung, assistant professor from McGill’s Reasoning and Learning Lab in the School of Computer Science. Cheung’s research seeks to develop computational methods for understanding text and speech with the goal to enable a machine to generate language that is fluent and appropriate to the context.”

The release continues, “Teaching machines to become literate is challenging due to the many subtle nuances of language. People learn language through exposure and experience over time. Consider the statement, ‘The bee landed on the flower because it had pollen.’ Humans know that ‘it’ in this context refers to the flower. Common sense, while natural for people, is very difficult for machines because they don’t have a groundedness in the world around us nor do they have experiences living and interacting in that environment.”

Dr. Cheung of McGill University commented, “Human-machine interaction using natural language is moving from the realm of science fiction to becoming reality. We can interact with chatbots or even talk to devices in our homes. Conversational interactions with current systems have been constrained, as it can be very difficult for machines to understand the subtleties of language and the broad range of words, terms and phrases that humans use… Partnering with Maluuba provides our students with the data and resources needed to assist in our research and to solve this problem. Most importantly, we’re able to demonstrate how our research can be put into practice to drive even more AI innovation.”

Read more at Marketwired.

Photo credit: MALUUBA

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