Text By the Bay

Natural Language Processing as the Core of a Consumer Application

NLP is often relegated to an after-the-fact, or off-to-the-side role: spam detection or gleaning business insight from user communication and comments that have already occurred. But a new generation of applications - Luka, Thumbtack, Fountain - put the understanding of natural language front and center, often as the first thing that consumers touch. We'll take a deep look at Fountain, both how it classifies plain English questions, and how it identifies which of 70,000+ human skills is necessary to solve the question. The talk will cover both language classification and relationship extraction, particularly focusing on how human expertise is interrelated.