Graph-based Natural Language Understanding

This event is co-hosted with the NY Graph Meetup (https://www.meetup.com/nygraph/events/244174914/) and Evening with a Data Scientist (https://www.meetup.com/Evening-with-a-Data-Scientist/events/244174888/).

AGENDA:

6pm - Doors

6:30pm-7pm: Mining and Searching text with Graph Databases

7pm-7:30pm: Voice-Driven Experiences with Neo4j and Amazon Alexa

7:30pm-8pm Networking

ABOUT THE TALKS:

Mining and Searching text with Graph Databases

By Dr. Alessandro Negro

A great part of the world's knowledge is stored using text in natural language, but using it in an effective way is still a major challenge. Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques provide the basis for harnessing this huge amount of data and converting it into a useful source of knowledge for further processing. It uses computer science, artificial intelligence and formal linguistics concepts to analyze natural language, aiming at deriving meaningful and useful information from text.
This session will highlight Neo4j as a viable tool in an NLP ecosystem demonstrating that it offers not only a suitable model for representing such complex data but also providing efficient ways for navigating this data. Dr. Negro will talk about features that allow the creation of advanced services on top of text analysis: recommendations, trend discovery, and finding influencers. In particular, the GraphAware NLP project will be presented as example in this direction. It is an open source Neo4j plugin that integrates NLP processing capabilities (provided by StanfordNLP and other NLP software) and existing ontology data sources (such as ConceptNet 5 and Wordnet) leveraging the power of Neo4j as backend engine

Voice-Driven Experiences with Neo4j and Amazon Alexa

By: Christophe Willemsen

In 2016, 25% of web searches on Android were made by voice and this percentage is predicted to double by 2018. From Amazon Alexa to Google Home, smartwatches and in-car systems, touch is no longer the primary user interface.

This talk highlights how graph databases help the creation of complex human computer interaction interfaces solving non-trivial tasks such as understanding user intents, keeping an accurate context aware representation of a user interaction and how to guide them in a domain specific knowledge base.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS:

Christopher Willemsen:

Christophe Willemsen (https://www.linkedin.com/in/christophe-willemsen-4a134a54/) is a Principal Consultant at GraphAware, world's number 1 Neo4j consultancy.
He is an expert on the Neo4j graph database and the Cypher query language and a skilled software engineer who has been involved in many Neo4j projects optimising complex Cypher queries, building enterprise-grade graph-based recommendation engines and developing search tools combining Neo4j and the Elastic Stack.

Christophe is also the author of the Neo4j driver for php and many Java extensions for Neo4j, those are available on theGraphAware Github ( https://github.com/graphaware ).

He has a deep passion for everything Computer Science and recently focus on the applications of Natural Language Processing in Voice-Driven interfaces and Chatbots, speaks English, French and Dutch and lives now with his family in Italy where he learns Italian.

You can find him on Twitter with handle @ikwattro (http://twitter.com/ikwattro)or at conferences and meetups all around the world.

Dr. Alessandro Negro:

Dr. Alessandro Negro (https://twitter.com/alessandronegro?lang=en) is the Chief Scientist at GraphAware. He has been a long-time member of the graph community and he is the main author of the first-ever recommendation engine based on Neo4j. At GraphAware, he specialises in recommendation engines, graph-aided search, and NLP.

He has recently built an application using Neo4j and Elasticsearch aimed at personalising search results, utilizing several machine learning algorithms, natural language processing and ontology hierarchy. Before joining the team, Alessandro has gained over 10 years of experience in software development and spoke at many prominent conferences, such as JavaOne. Alessandro holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of Salento.

ABOUT OUR HOSTS (WeWork):

WeWork is the platform for creators. We provide beautiful workspace, an inspiring community, and meaningful business services to tens of thousands of members around the world. From startups and freelancers to small businesses and large corporations, our community is united by a desire for our members to create meaningful work and lead meaningful lives—to be a part of something greater than ourselves. Co-founded by Adam Neumann and Miguel McKelvey in New York City in 2010, WeWork is a privately held company with over 2000 employees.