Research collaboration with MIPT on Chatbot System development

Luiza Sayfullina made a 2 month research visit to the iPavlov lab, which is one of the most progressive labs in Russia in Natural Language Processing and Chatbot Systems in particular. The lab belongs to Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and is honored with Facebook AI Academic Partnership and NVIDIA GPU Research Center status. It is led by Professor Mikhail Burtsev, who kindly agreed to host Luiza during her stay.

Luiza was working with the open source DeepPavlov library that contains NLP components such as Named Entity Recognition, Question Answering, Intent Classification and Insult Detection for developing Chatbot Systems. She focused on researching available knowledge bases and how they can be used to improve a Question Answering system (Q&A system). In particular, Luiza and her collaborators employed Microsoft Probase and Wikidata word relations to form relation-specific embeddings to be used with a Sequence to Sequence model for a Q&A system. At the moment, they continue their experiments and plan to publish a paper on this topic.

Luiza’s research visit was supported by HIIT and she also wishes to thank the iPavlov lab for an educational and pleasant stay.