We enjoyed another fascinating meetup this past Wednesday evening as once again we were joined by three great speakers from across the world sharing their amazing work in the third of the NLP Series of the AI in Action Virtual Meetup.

First up, Branden Chan who is a Machine Learning Engineer at Berlin startup Deepset taught us about Neural Search: Scaling QA to thousands of documents. With recent advances in transfer learning, the performance of Question Answering models has reached new heights and suddenly created a new class of industrial search applications.

Branden explained how to fine-tune a transformer model for the task of extractive Question Answering and how to scale it to thousands of documents (Open-Domain QA). In addition to recent insights from research, he also shared practical tips on how to implement State-of-the-Art systems yourself using open-source frameworks.

Next up, Paul Walsh, Analytics and AI Senior Manager at Accenture The Dock in Dublin told us about the relevant factors in how they won Kaggle’s COVID-19 Challenges. The Dock is Accenture’s Global Innovation Center, headquartered in Dublin, where we assembled teams of researchers to help answer critical questions in the Kaggle Covid-19 data science competition.

Paul outlined how they approached the problem and used NLP and text mining techniques to develop world-beating solutions for automatically answering critical World Health Organization questions on the pandemic. He also provides Strategic and technical details along with sample code and publicly available notebooks that you can check out.

Finally, Senior Data Scientist at Autodesk Yizel Vizcarra who joined us all the way from San Francisco discussed her passion for Supporting online community forums with NLP. Online community forums are spaces for members to share ideas, discuss interests, ask questions, and receive peer-to-peer support on a given topic.

Because they are dynamic in nature and rich with context, it can be difficult to keep up to date with what is going on in an online community as both a member and a community manager. In her talk, Yizel helps you learn more about using NLP to empower community members to engage with each other on new topics and improve the community manager experience.

Watch this fascinating meetup in full below.

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