AI & RoboticsNews

Amazon researchers use NLP data set to improve Alexa’s answers

Improving the quality of voice assistants’ responses to questions is of interest to tech giants like Google, Apple, and Microsoft, who seek to address shortfalls in their respective natural language processing (NLP) technologies. They’ve plenty in the way of motivation — more than 50% of U.S. smart speaker owners say they ask questions of their devices, according to a survey conducted last…
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AI & RoboticsNews

AI determines how much help Shakespeare had writing a play

Many believe that Shakespeare had help writing at least some of his plays, but to what extent? AI might have an answer. Czech researcher Petr Plecháč has developed a machine learning system that determined which portions of Henry VIII were likely written by Shakespeare’s contemporary (and long-suspected collaborator) John Fletcher. The approach trained an algorithm to recognize the…
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AI & RoboticsNews

Humans are responsible for the antics of our AIs

Welcome to Hitting the Books. With less than one in five Americans reading just for fun these days, we’ve done the hard work for you by scouring the internet for the most interesting, thought provoking books on science and technology we can find and delivering an…
AI & RoboticsNews

No, AI is not for social good

Faced with the public furor over problems with artificial intelligence, tech companies and researchers would now have us believe that the big fix for those problems is to develop AI for social good. This proposal is not new; it’s the latest in a long line of bold, mostly…
AI & RoboticsNews

AI Weekly: Multimodal learning is in right now — here’s why that’s a good thing

Data sets are fundamental building blocks of AI systems, and this paradigm isn’t likely to ever change. Without a corpus on which to draw, as human beings employ daily, models can’t learn the relationships that inform their predictions. But why stop at a single corpus? An intriguing report by ABI Research anticipates that while the total installed base of AI devices will grow from 2.69 billion…
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AI & RoboticsNews

Facebook trains AI to generate worlds in a fantasy text adventure

Procedurally generating an interesting video game environment isn’t just challenging — it’s incredibly time-consuming. Tools like Promethean AI, which tap machine learning to generate scenes, promise to ease the design burden somewhat. But barriers remain. That’s why researchers at Facebook, the University of Lorraine, and the University College London in a preprint research paper…
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