In the spring of 2013, Language Technologies Institute Ph.D. student Leonid Boytsov and Bilegsaikhan (Bileg) Naidan, a Ph.D. student at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, had a problem. They needed to evaluate a novel nearest-neighbor search method for non-metric spaces, but no adequate software suite was available.
So they built one.
That software, Non-Metric Space Library (NMSLIB), is available to the public and gaining traction... Read More
Millions of visually impaired people in India may benefit from free, open-source software for Android devices that converts electronic text written in Indian languages into messages they can hear.
The text-to-speech (TTS) software, developed by Carnegie Mellon University in collaboration with the Hear2Read project, can now be downloaded free of charge from Google Play. Tamil is the first language offered, with subsequent releases of... Read More
A paper by a team of School of Computer Science researchers has been named one of nine outstanding long papers at the Association for Computational Linguistics annual meeting (ACL 2016). The conference, to be held Aug. 7–12 in Berlin, offers tutorials, workshops and presentations on the latest research in a broad spectrum of diverse research areas concerned with computational approaches to natural language.
The paper, "Harnessing Deep Neural... Read More
Most social media users know the story: You're reading your newsfeed and open a new tab on your browser to do some shopping. The next time you log in to whatever social media platform you'd used, the advertisements miraculously relate directly to what you'd been shopping for. Coincidence? No way. Machine learning techniques are working way below the surface to determine what you're looking at and what deals apply to you.
Imagine if you could harness that technology so you'd receive a message when you were near a store offering just what you were looking for — from the perfect... Read More
In 2000, Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science Sphinx group released a collection of open-source speech recognition development libraries and tools that, over time, came to be known as CMUSphinx. Late last month, the group celebrated 1.5 million downloads of this toolkit, which is used for speech recognition research and building speech products.
Begun as a DARPA-funded project, Sphinx is committed to widely releasing its... Read More
The International Center for Advanced Communication Technologies (InterACT) celebrates its 25th anniversary this week at InterACT 25, a three-day symposium that highlights the organization's contributions to developing key technologies that help eliminate barriers between people across the world.
Founded by Carnegie Mellon University and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology... Read More
Artificial intelligence might be the latest buzzword(s) in the tech world, but anyone who has used an intelligent personal agent like Apple's Siri or Amazon's Alexa knows that challenges still exist in areas like speech recognition and machine translation.
Language Technologies Professor Alan Black agrees, and has been featured in two recent articles about AI research.
In the Forbes article "... Read More
In an article published on May 13, the Washington Post claimed that Donald Trump routinely posed as his own public relations agent in the 1980s and 1990s, using the alias "John Miller" or "John Barron" to boast of Trump's personal and professional successes. When questioned about it now, though, Trump resolutely denies doing any such thing. What's a person to believe?
Enter... Read More
The old saying holds that "many hands make light work," and modern crowdsourcing efforts certainly prove that to be true. One standout example is Wikipedia, which relies on a network of people around the world to create, edit and maintain its entries. Editors on the site assume different roles according to their areas of expertise: some may add large chunks of information to an entry, while others may stick to smaller tasks like copyediting.
In the past, systems designed to route work to appropriate Wikipedia editors have focused on matching editors to articles that relate to ones... Read More
WeSpeke, a global digital learning platform designed for practicing languages, sharing cultures and making international connections co-founded by LTI Director Jaime Carbonell, has announced the addition of a new app to its language-learning arsenal.
The new technology, WeSpeke Lessons, allows users to access and purchase high-quality language lessons delivered in an easy-to-use interface.... Read More