Kakao Enterprise registered 17 papers at a top-tier global academic conference in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) in the first half of 2022.
It announced research results encompassing the fields of natural language processing, speech processing, and computer vision, and this year, it also published papers in the fields of reinforcement learning and knowledge graph, strengthening its position as a nationally representative AI technology company.
Among these, it particularly stood out in the fields of natural language processing and voice processing, demonstrating AI that speaks like a human and recognizes emotions.
Kakao Enterprise announced at NAACL, the world’s leading academic society in the field of natural language processing, a methodology that uses an existing pretrained language model to extract emotions from conversations.
In the field of natural language processing, a method using common sense or external knowledge about emotions is used to recognize emotions in conversations, but there is a problem in that it is difficult to apply this method in non-English languages because the accumulated prior knowledge is less than in English. We proposed a new methodology to solve this problem and proved that high performance in emotion recognition can be achieved in Korean without relying on external knowledge.
A total of four research results were presented at INTERSPEECH, the world’s largest academic conference in the field of speech processing. Among these, the method of simplifying the existing ‘Neural TTS (Text to Speech)’ development process by applying the ‘E2E (End to End)-TTS’ technique received particular attention from the industry. While the existing neural TTS method had to learn two models (acoustic feature generator, neural vocoder) separately for voice processing, the E2E-TTS technique allows learning two models at once, which not only shortens the learning process. It can produce higher quality voices. We develop natural, high-quality voices that are difficult to distinguish from real people and produce clearer voices in real-time services.
Kakao Enterprise focuses on ‘practical AI’ and is making great efforts to connect global technology to various services. In addition to introducing an AI chatbot that can have natural everyday conversations like real people through emotion analysis and synthesized sound technology, the AI contact center ‘Kakao i Connect Center’ has been further advanced to support customer consultation and We plan to strive to streamline our work.
In addition to presenting papers, the world also achieved notable results in global top-tier AI competitions. Last June, 1:1 verification of the ‘Face Recognition Vendor Test (FRVT)’ hosted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), a leading global technology standard. In the ‘kiosk’ category, Kakao Enterprise ranked first in the world. Korea’s AI technology was proven by taking the lead among famous AI companies around the world leading facial recognition technology, including those in the United States and China.
Last March, it ranked first in the performance evaluation of the Korean machine reading dataset ‘KorQuAD 2.0 (The Korean Question Answering Dataset 2.0)’ using its self-developed natural language processing AI model. Following the first place in Coquad 1.0 in 2019, it ranked first in Coquad 2.0, which has a higher level of difficulty, in 2022, solidifying its position as a strong player in the field of Korean machine reading to the point where it can be said that there are no longer any competitors. The ‘LittleBird-large’ model, which ranked first, recorded an accuracy of 90.22 points, and the processing speed was also about 1.7 times faster than the existing first place model.
Baek Sang-yeop, CEO of Kakao Enterprise, said, “Kakao Enterprise has achieved excellent results, such as presenting papers at top-tier academic conferences around the world and taking first place in technology competitions with global companies, and these results are not limited to one company, but Korea’s AI “I feel an infinite sense of responsibility in the idea of promoting technological prowess,” he said. “Just as semiconductors drove Korea’s manufacturing competitiveness, we will spare no effort and invest a lot to ensure that AI can become a seed technology for Korea’s digital industry.”
He continued, “Kakao Enterprise plans to focus on providing technology that can provide a better life to users by further advancing AI technology and connecting it to AI chatbots, contact centers, and even actual services that make up smart cities.”
Source: Pangyo Techno Valley Official Newsroom
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