It is our pleasure to announce the next meetup of our NLP in Action Expert Group, which will take place on April 3rd at the SBB headquarters in Bern, starting from 4.30 PM.

The address is Hilfikerstrasse 1, 3014 Bern (i.e. the Wankdorf SBB building).

Talk 1

Title: Theory Vs. Practice – It’s a Data and Trust Problem, by Dr Claudiu Musat, Swisscom

Focusing on the creation of dialogue systems, the Swisscom ML research team has been often asked to improve systems that are currently in use. To an ML person, this is a dream case, as the starting expectation is that any ML system should beat hand crafted rules. Moreover, after framing the problem correctly, we find that it is actually well studied and that the solutions abound. The task is easy. In theory.

We find that the data available at the start of projects is not there, not in the right format or simply not enough. In this talk I will discuss possible solutions to the low data availability and showcase several problems where traditional approaches fail. In practice.

If you are interested in presenting, please write to Silvia or Martin directly.