Yandex and the Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg open the Natural Language Laboratory. The laboratory will study natural language texts, develop deep learning methods for their generation and analyze data in computational linguistics.
Yandex, as a project partner, will help to attract leading experts in the field of artificial intelligence and data analysis to work in the laboratory on a long-term basis.
The laboratory will be headed by Ivan Yamshchikov, Research Fellow at Yandex and Associate Professor at the Higher School of Economics – St. Petersburg:
I come from St. Petersburg, so I am very glad that we are creating a laboratory here. Yandex has unique world-class expertise in machine learning. The combination of this expertise with the experience and dynamism of the Higher School of Economics, and even seasoned with the atmosphere of creative search and freedom of thought, traditional for St. Petersburg, – you can’t even dream of more if you want to create a scientific laboratory.
This is one of the few laboratories in Russia where they will deal with natural language processing. New research will foster the development of technologies through which voice assistants communicate with people, and machines create stories or analyze documents. The laboratory will also work on the creation of the mathematical apparatus needed to describe generative language models. The theoretical and applied directions of the laboratory’s work will complement each other.
The laboratory is being created on the basis of the St. Petersburg School of Physics, Mathematics, and Computer Science, NRU HSE – St. Petersburg. The school has been successfully working in the field of artificial intelligence and data analysis for a long time – for example, the faculty regularly hosts research seminars, and students and alumni participate in international conferences and become winners of the NeurIPS competition. In the laboratory, students will be able to write a thesis and in the future get into the state to do scientific work.
The creation of the laboratory in St. Petersburg continues HSE’s cooperation with Yandex. Within the framework of cooperation, the Faculty of Computer Science of the Higher School of Economics was created, which has a basic Yandex department and a Yandex scientific and educational laboratory, created in March 2020. It trains professional scientists and conducts research in the field of data science. It is planned that the divisions will cooperate – the research topics of both laboratories are very close.
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Source: Yandex Press Release
