Episode 23 - NLP in the Lands of Foursquare with @kjc9
Kris Conception talks about Natural Language Processing, Natural Language Understanding, and machine translation. We then go into how we build the taste ontology at Foursquare to supercharge the best city guide in the world, and how it connects concepts through languages and cultures.
About Kris
Kris Conception graduated from Columbia with bachelors and masters with a focus on natural language processing. Before working at Foursquare, Kris pent 14 years working for government contractors dealing with various AI/NLP problems.
His last four and half years have been at Foursquare. He maintains our language stacks, and works on both our consumer and enterprise products. This of course include our core venue search technology.
References
Read the Foursquare Engineering article on Taste Translation.
Improving Taste Translation
Exploring the Foursquare Taste Map
I have a few talks on NLP at Foursquare. Here’s one in 2014 with Maryam Aly at the NYU tech week.
Here’s another one at Cambridge University in 2015.
Also, Episode 2 with Maryam Aly is where I last discussed internationalization and translation.
Also relevant to Foursquare’s Marsbot is Episode 7 with Dennis Crowley and Episode 12 with Marissa Chacko.
Book Mentioned
Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages – This is a fascinating book about the languages of the world, and how the variations in language and expression are interwoven with culture.
