CoQA: A Conversational Question Answering Challenge by Siva Reddy, Stanford NLP

Siva Reddy (Computer Science Postdoc, Stanford University) will give a talk on CoQA, a novel dataset released last month for building conversational question-answer systems. Food and drinks will be provided when the doors open at 6:30PM, doors close at 7:00PM sharp, and the talk begins at 7:00PM. Interested in presenting your work at a future Bay Area Research in NLP and ML Meetup? Click here: https://goo.gl/forms/xtn1CrhyhLQk1D5i1

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Abstract of Siva's talk:
Humans gather information by engaging in conversations involving a series of interconnected questions and answers. For machines to assist in information gathering, it is therefore essential to enable them to answer conversational questions. In this talk, I will present our work on CoQA, a novel dataset for building Conversational Question Answering systems. CoQA contains 127k questions with answers, obtained from 8k conversations about text passages from seven diverse domains. The questions are conversational, and the answers are free-form text with their corresponding evidence highlighted in the passage. We analyze CoQA in depth and show that conversational questions have challenging phenomena not present in existing reading comprehension datasets, e.g., coreference and pragmatic reasoning. We evaluate strong conversational and reading comprehension models on CoQA. The best system obtains an F1 score of 65.1%, which is 23.7 points behind human performance (88.8%), indicating there is ample room for improvement. This is a joint work with Danqi Chen. We launch CoQA as a challenge to the community at https://stanfordnlp.github.io/coqa/

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About Siva Reddy:
Siva Reddy is a postdoc in Computer Science at Stanford University working with Prof. Christopher Manning. His research focuses on enabling natural communication between humans and machines. Prior to the postdoc, he was a Google PhD Fellow at the University of Edinburgh under the supervision of Prof. Mirella Lapata and Prof. Mark Steedman.

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About this Meetup group:
Organized by the AI team at Mya Systems, this Meetup group is looking to bring together people testing and iterating novel approaches for potential applications in Artificial Intelligence. Come network, listen to what folks are working on, and learn from interactive sessions with experts in NLP & ML.

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About Mya Systems:
Founded in 2012, Mya Systems brings deep learning and NLP expertise together to disrupt the recruiting operational model. See more at www.hiremya.com.