Google has open sourced its artificial intelligence (AI) tools such as SyntaxNet and Parsey McParseface, enabling developers to add the technology to their applications without wasting resources.
SyntaxNet is an open-source neural network framework that provides a foundation for Natural Language Understanding (NLU) systems, while Parsey McParseface is an English parser used to analyze the language text
Google Senior staff research scientist Slav Petrov in a blog said: "Parsey McParseface is built on powerful machine learning algorithms that learn to analyze the linguistic structure of language, and that can explain the functional role of each word in a given sentence."
It expects that he tool will be useful for developers and researchers interested in automatic extraction of information, translation, and other core applications of NLU.
SyntaxNet tags each word with a part-of-speech (POS) tag that describes the word’s syntactic function after receiving as sentence as input. It also determines the syntactic relationships between words in the sentence, represented in the dependency parse tree.
Petrov said: "SyntaxNet applies neural networks to the ambiguity problem. An input sentence is processed from left to right, with dependencies between words being incrementally added as each word in the sentence is considered.
"At each point in processing many decisions may be possible — due to ambiguity — and a neural network gives scores for competing decisions based on their plausibility."
Google said that Parsey McParseface can understand English language words and sentences with an accuracy of 94%.
Both the tools are currently available in English and the company may include more languages to increase the use of its AI tools.
"While there are no explicit studies in the literature about human performance, we know from our in-house annotation projects that linguists trained for this task agree in 96-97% of the cases. This suggests that we are approaching human performance — but only on well-formed text," he added.
In 2014, Google Google had teamed up with Oxford University’s computer science and engineering departments to bolster its AI efforts.
As part of the deal, which was aimed at promoting scientific research into revolutionising human-machine communications, Oxford professors, who were behind startups Dark Blue Labs and Vision Factory, joined Google’s DeepMind team.
DeepMind makes applications which are used in simulations, e-commerce and games using general-purpose learning algorithms. Google acquired the company in January 2014.
Google has also collaborated with a research team from the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) to develop new quantum information processors based on superconducting electronics for deployment in artificial intelligence applications.
