Deep or Shallow, NLP Is Breaking Out

One of the featured speakers at the inaugural Text By The Bay conference, held in San Francisco in April 2015, drew laughter when describing a neural network question-answering model that could beat human players in a trivia game.

While such performance by computers is fairly well known to the general public, thanks to IBM's Watson cognitive computer, the speaker, natural language processing (NLP) researcher Richard Socher, said, the neural network model he described "was built by one grad student using deep learning" rather than by a large team with the resources of a global corporation behind them.