Won't it be great to have ML models that can update their “learning” as and when they make mistake and correction is provided in real time? In this talk we look at a concrete business use case which warrants such a system. We will take a deep dive to understand the use case and how we went about building a continuously learning system for text classification. The approaches we took, the results we got.

For most machine learning systems, “train once, just predict thereafter” paradigm works well. However, there are scenarios when this paradigm does not suffice. The model needs to be updated often enough. Two of the most common cases are:

1. When the distribution is non-stationary i.e. the distribution of the data changes. This implies that with time the test data will have very different distribution from the training data.
2. The model needs to learn from its mistakes.

While (1) is often addressed by retraining the model, (2) is often addressed using batch update. Batch updation requires collecting a sizeable number of feedback points. What if you have much fewer feedback points? You need model that can learn continuously - as and when model makes a mistake and feedback is provided. To best of our knowledge there is a very limited literature on this.

Recent advances in machine learning have rekindled the quest to build machines that can interact with outside environment like we human do - using visual clues, voice and text. An important piece of this trilogy are systems that can process and understand text in order to automate various workflows such as chat bots, named entity recognition, machine translation, information extraction, summarization, FAQ system, etc.

A key step towards achieving any of the above task is - using the right set of techniques to represent text in a form that machine can understand easily. Unlike images, where directly using the intensity of pixels is a natural way to represent the image; in case of text there is no such natural representation. No matter how good is your ML algorithm, it can do only so much unless there is a richer way to represent underlying text data. Thus, whatever NLP application you are building, it’s imperative to find a good representation for your text data.

In this bootcamp, we will understand key concepts, maths, and code behind the state-of-the-art techniques for text representation. We will cover mathematical explanations as well as implementation details of these techniques. This bootcamp aims to demystify, both - Theory (key concepts, maths) and Practice (code) that goes into building these techniques. At the end of this bootcamp participants would have gained a fundamental understanding of these schemes with an ability to implement them on datasets of their interest.

This would be a 1-day instructor-led hands-on training session to learn and implement an end-to-end deep learning model for natural language processing.

Sentiment analysis has been for long poster boy problem of NLP and has attracted a lot of research. However, despite so much work in this sub area, most sentiment analysis models fail miserably in handling sarcasm. Rise in usage of sentiment models for analysis social data has only exposed this gap further. Owing to the subtilty of language involved, sarcasm detection is not easy and has facinated NLP community.

Most attempts at sarcasm detection still depend on hand crafted features which are dataset specific. In this talk we see some of the very recent attempts to leverage recent advances in NLP for building generic models for sarcasm detection.

Key take aways:
+ Challenges in sarcasm detection
+ Deep dive into a end to end solution using DL to build generic models for sarcasm detection
+ Short comings and road forward