Natural Language Understanding for Personal Virtual Assistants

Abstract: Dialogue systems have been a large focus of interest in the Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing communities for over 40 years, but it's only in the last few years that they have really started to become a part of our daily lives. In this talk I will give a high-level overview of some of the technologies and challenges of dialogue systems, as well as the shortcomings of current systems, and how these systems might be improved in the years to come.

Bio: Robert Felty has a BA in German from Grinnell College and a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Michigan. His dissertation and post-doctoral research focused on speech recognition by humans. He spent a number of years learning programming on his own and spent several years working as a web developer. He joined Nuance in 2010, working on automated telephone systems, then shortly thereafter moved into a research position, working on DragonTv, a dialogue system to talk to your tv (and have it understand you).https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/images/cleardot.gif

Approximate agenda:

6:30 - Meet and greet, intros

6:40 - Presentation

7:30 - Dinner