Natural Language Processing Group
News & features
Robust Language Representation Learning via Multi-task Knowledge Distillation
Language Representation Learning maps symbolic natural language texts (for example, words, phrases and sentences) to semantic vectors. Robust and universal language representations are crucial to achieving state-of-the-art results on many Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. Ensemble learning is one of…
Machine Reading Systems Are Becoming More Conversational
A team of researchers from the Natural Language Processing (NLP) Group at Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA) and the Speech Dialog Research Group at Microsoft Redmond are currently leading in the Conversational Question Answering (CoQA) Challenge organized by Stanford University. In…
Towards universal language embeddings
| Jianfeng Gao
Language embedding is a process of mapping symbolic natural language text (for example, words, phrases and sentences) to semantic vector representations. This is fundamental to deep learning approaches to natural language understanding (NLU). It is highly desirable to learn language…
Getting into a conversational groove: New approach encourages risk-taking in data-driven neural modeling
Microsoft Research’s Natural Language Processing group has set an ambitious goal for itself: to create a neural model that can engage in the full scope of conversational capabilities, providing answers to requests while also bringing the value of additional information…
The poet in the machine: Auto-generation of poetry directly from images through multi-adversarial training – and a little inspiration
As the means of expressing thoughts and feelings too sublime and elusive to be conveyed in everyday language, poetry across all cultures occupies a most sophisticated and mysterious of realms, just beyond the outskirts of creativity. Along the language-based avenues…
Microsoft NLP researchers converge at ACL 2016, edging ever closer to human-like conversational experiences
By Bill Dolan, Principal Researcher, Microsoft Research This year, the annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) will be held in Berlin, Germany, August 7-12, 2016, at Humboldt University. ACL is the premier conference on natural language processing…
Speaking in Someone Else’s Language
Springtime on the sun-drenched Amalfi Coast. A perfect little café perched high above the sea, the scent of jasmine and lemon blossoms wafting past. You open the menu, hungry for lunch. Oh, wait—you don’t know any Italian. Now what? Not…
Software Aids Language Learners
By Gary Alt, Writer, Microsoft Imagine mining the web to learn a language. No, not the jargon of webspeak, where IMHO means “in my humble opinion” or F2F is “face to face,” but real, spoken languages, such as Spanish, Hindi,…
Translator Fast-Tracks Haitian Creole
By Janie Chang, Writer, Microsoft Research In disaster relief, every hour makes a difference, and communication is essential. When aid efforts began after the recent Haiti earthquake, a request came to the Machine Translation team within Microsoft Research’s Natural Language…