On October 14, 2015, I attended the regular meeting of the DCNLP meetup group, a group on natural language processing (NLP) in Washington, DC area. The talk was titled “Deep Learning for Question Answering“, spoken by Mr. Mohit Iyyer, a Ph.D. student in Department of Computer Science, University of Maryland (my alma mater!). He is a very good speaker.
I have no experience on deep learning at all although I did write a blog post remotely related. I even didn’t start training my first neural network until the next day after the talk. However, Mr. Iyyer explained what recurrent neural network (RNN), recursive neural network, and deep averaging network (DAN) are. This helped me a lot in order to understanding more about the principles of the famous word2vec model (which is something I am going to write about soon!). You can refer to his slides for more details. There are really a lot of talents in College Park, like another expert, Joe Yue Hei Ng, who is exploiting deep learning a lot as well.
The applications are awesome: with external knowledge to factual question answering, reasoning-based question answering, and visual question answering, with increasing order of challenging levels.
Mr. Iyyer and the participants discussed a lot about different packages. Mr. Iyyer uses Theano, a Python package for deep learning, which is good for model building and other analytical work. Some prefer Caffe. Some people, who are Java developers, also use deeplearning4j.
This meetup was a sacred one too, because it is the last time it was held in Stetsons Famous Bar & Grill at U Street, which is going to permanently close on Halloween this year. The group is eagerly looking for a new venue for the upcoming meetup. This meeting was a crowded one. I sincerely thank the organizers, Charlie Greenbacker and Liz Merkhofer, for hosting all these meetings, and Chris Phipps (a linguist from IBM Watson) for recording.
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