In the world of multilingual voice assistance, Amazon announced a new dataset called MASSIVE, a new competition using MASSIVE, and a workshop, Massively Multilingual NLU 2022.
Imagine if everyone in the world could use voice AI systems such as Alexa in their native tongues. A promising approach to realising this vision is massively multilingual natural-language understanding (MMNLU). It is a paradigm where a single ML model can explain and understand input from many typologically diverse languages. This model can learn a shared data representation that spans languages and transfer knowledge from languages with abundant training data to those in which training data is scarce.
Amazon made three announcements related to MMNLU by releasing:
- A new dataset called MASSIVE, composed of one million labelled utterances spanning 51 languages, along with open-source code, provides examples of performing massively multilingual NLU modelling and allows practitioners to re-create baseline results for intent classification and slot filling.
- A new competition using the MASSIVE dataset called Massively Multilingual NLU 2022 (MMNLU-22).
- To co-host a workshop at EMNLP 2022 in Abu Dhabi and online, also called Massively Multilingual NLU 2022.
Image: Amazon.science
Prem Natarajan, VP of Alexa AI Natural Understanding, said, “We are very excited to share this large multilingual dataset with the worldwide language research community. We hope the dataset will help researchers worldwide to drive new advances in multilingual language understanding that expand the availability and reach of conversational-AI technologies”.
