This week, several startups have made announcements launching new features and partnerships. Here’s the latest on company updates.
Maluuba releases two sophisticated natural language understanding datasets
Montreal-based Maluuba, a natural language understanding company focused on helping machines learn, think, and communicate, released two natural language understanding datasets.
The company said that its goal is to further advance and facilitate breakthrough innovation in artificial intelligence research, and claimed that they’ve created the world’s largest human-created question answering dataset. Maluuba’s new datasets explore aspects of human capabilities in literacy and conversation. The datasets exhibit complexity and have been developed for machine reading comprehension, goal-oriented dialogue systems, and conversational interface research.
“We believe that language understanding is fundamental to solving artificial intelligence,” said Kaheer Suleman, co-founder and CTO of Maluuba. “Our hope is that the Maluuba datasets will push forward the field of AI and natural language, so that collectively we can reach our goal of a world where machines communicate intuitively with humans.”
Maluuba’s first dataset, NewsQA, was developed to train algorithms capable of answering complex questions that require human-level comprehension and reasoning skills. To develop the dataset, the company leveraged CNN articles from the DeepMind Q&A Dataset, and prepared a crowd-sourced machine reading corpus of 120,000 question-answer pairs.
Maluuba’s second dataset, Frames, consists of 19,986 turns that can be used to help train deep-learning algorithms on natural conversations. These text-based conversations were recorded between two humans, simulating the conversation between a vacation seeker and a travel agent.
Find Maluuba’s datasets here.
Zambah partners with deadmau5-founded record label
Zambah, a social music discovery and streaming platform, is partnering with deadmau5-founded record label, mau5trap.
The two companies will collaborate on playlists that will bring attention to new and emerging artists. mau5trap will use Zambah’s streamlined submission process that allows undiscovered or independent artists to directly submit music to brands through Zambah’s ‘Tastemakers’ feature. mau5trap will use the feature to accept song submissions for multiple playlists they will create on the platform. All songs submitted will be considered for these playlists.
“We’re really excited to be working with mau5trap on this initiative to bring more awareness to new and emerging artists that need more shine on their work. We can’t wait to share their finished playlist with music fans all over the world,” said Ken Asafo, co-founder of Zambah.
Zambah is part of Oshawa-based Spark Centre‘s Thrive Accelerator program.