Intel AL Lab has open-sourced a library of natural language processing tool, which will be a help to developers creating chatbots and building skills for virtual assistants. It is one of several AI resources made available since Intel AI Lab was launched last year.

NLP Architect is a Python library for exploring deep learning topologies and techniques for natural language processing and natural language understanding and is intended to be a platform for future research and collaboration. Currently it includes the following features that its developers have found interesting both from a research perspective and in terms of practical applications:

NLP core models that allow robust extraction of linguistic features for NLP workflow: for example, dependency parser and NP chunker





NLU modules that provide best in class performance:for example, intent extraction (IE), name entity recognition (NER)





Modules that address semantic understanding: for example, colocations, most common word sense, NP embedding representation (e.g. NP2V)





Components instrumental for conversational AI: for example, ChatBot applications, including dialog system, sequence chunking, and IE





End-to-end DL applications using new topologies: for example, Q&A, machine reading comprehension

End-to-end examples of training and inference processes have also been provided together with some of the functionalities often used when deploying these models, such as data pipelines, common functional calls, and utilities related to NLP and the library is modularized for easy integration. Based on their experience Intel AI's NLP researchers consider the components in NLP Architect as a set of building blocks that are needed for implementing NLP use cases.

In the Intel AI blog post introducing NLP Architect, Yinyin Liu, Head of Data Science, Artificial Intelligence Products Group and Natural Language Processing and Deep Learning Researcher Moshe Wasserblat write:

This open and flexible library of NLP components provides the foundations for us to enable NLP solutions with our partners and customers. We are still actively incorporating new results from our research and data science into this stack to allow everyone to re-use what we’ve built and optimized. The library also provides us the platform for analysis and optimizations of Intel software and hardware on NLP workloads.

Some of the components, with provided pre-trained models, are exposed as REST service APIs through NLP Architect server. NLP Architect server is designed to provide predictions across different models in NLP Architect. It also includes a web front-end exposing the model annotations for visualizations.

NLP Architect is one of several AI products that are open-sourced by Intel AI, which was launched last year subsequent to its purchase of deep-learning startup Nervana Systems for an estimated $408 million.

Neon, Nervana's deep learning framework, was already open sourced when Intel acquired Nervana and has now been optimized for better performance on CPUs by enabling Intel Math Kernel Library (MKL). The DNN (Deep Neural Networks) component of MKL that is used by neon is provided free of charge and downloaded automatically as part of the neon installation.

ngraph also had its inception prior to Intel involvement and is a framework-neutral C++ library, compiler and runtime which enables a wide range of compute platforms to run and train Deep Neural Network (DNN) models. Coach, a framework for training and evaluating reinforcement learning (RL) agents by harnessing the power of multi-core CPU processing with multi-threaded implementations for some of today’s leading RL algorithms, combined with various games and robotics environments, is more recent and seems to be a product of the Intel/ Nervana collaboration.

Another anticipated product is the Intel Nervana Neural Net L-1000, Intel's first widely available chip for the accelerated training of neural nets, which is due out in late 2019.

More Information

Introducing NLP Architect by Intel AI Lab

Checking in with the Intel AI Lab

Intel AI Lab

NervanaSystems/nlp-architect on GitHub

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