Marcu discusses the current state of natural language processing and query answering, as well as what makes the challenge of NLP unique for Alexa and voice AI systems.

Conversational AI

Alexa & Friends features Daniel Marcu, Director at Alexa AI

Watch the recording of Marcu's live interview with Alexa evangelist Jeff Blankenburg.

By Staff writer

August 21, 2020

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On August 27, Daniel Marcu, a director in the Alexa AI organization, joined Jeff Blankenburg on Alexa & Friends to discuss the current state of natural language processing (NLP) and query answering in Alexa. His appearance aligned with KDD 2020, where researchers and practitioners convened virtually to discuss topics related to data science, data mining, knowledge discovery, large-scale data analytics, and big data.

Marcu is recognized as a leading authority in NLP and is a successful entrepreneur. He co-authored an MIT Press book, The Theory and Practice of Discourse Parsing and Summarization, along with more than 100 peer-reviewed articles, and has been granted 34 US patents. He is a 2014 fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics for significant contributions to discourse parsing, summarization, and machine translation as well as for kick-starting the statistical machine translation industry.

Watch the recording of Marcu's interview below to learn more about the current state of NLP and query answering, as well as what makes the challenge of NLP unique for Alexa and voice AI systems.

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