The NeuralSpace Platform: An Introduction and Overview
The problem of lack of NLP Solutions for low-resource languages and NeuralSpace as a solution
The shortage of Natural Language Processing (NLP) solutions for low-resource languages (local languages spoken primarily in Asia and Africa) has been known for years, but even today more than 90% of all NLP solutions are exclusively available for high-resource languages such as English, Spanish and German, and only 6% are available for low-resource languages.
The population size speaking each language, on the other hand, is not in line with this distribution as more than three billion people call one of the low-resource languages their mother tongue. Such a large portion of the world population is still underserved by NLP systems because of various challenges that developers face when building NLP systems for low-resource languages.
Thus emerged NeuralSpace — a Software as a Service (SaaS) platform which offers developers a suite of APIs and a no-code web interface for NLP functionalities (called NeuralSpace Apps) that can be used without having any Machine Learning (ML) or Data Science knowledge. The Apps can process more than 80 languages, of which most are spoken in Asia and Africa.
The NeuralSpace Platform currently consists of five Apps: Language Understanding, Machine Translation, Transliteration, Augmentation & Language Detection. These Apps can be easily combined to build end-to-end text processing systems. Over the next few months, the team at NeuralSpace will add many more Apps with a focus on speech recognition.
Why developers will love using the NeuralSpace Platform is twofold. First, it’s language-agnostic AutoNLP that fully takes care of any custom model hyperparameter specifications when training on each unique dataset. Thus, developers without any prior knowledge in ML can directly use the NeuralSpace Platform and can focus on the NLP system’s integration in their product using APIs. Second, it’s AutoMLOps capabilities that can scale any NLP system to process a nearly infinite number of (text and speech) requests in linear time. Multiple model replicas are deployed to deliver, at any time, a request per second (RPS) rate that is acceptable for the developer’s solution.
Another capability of NeuralSpace is the possibility to deploy the NeuralSpace Platform in a private cloud, so privacy-concerned firms have full control of their data. This has already been done on OVHcloud but is also feasible with other cloud providers.
NeuralSpace is on a mission to break down the language barrier and enable people to access the Internet in the language and mode of their choice.
Applications of the NeuralSpace Platform:
1. Language Understanding
NeuralSpace’s Language Understanding App, understands the intent of the user, and extracts relevant information (entities) from what they said (speech) or wrote (text). The App is commonly used in automatic chat or voice assistants and, once the intent of the user is understood, sends commands to perform a relevant action. It allows developers to build voice assistants with unique possibilities for customer service teams. Various projects can easily be created in the NeuralSpace Platform from automatically providing information about tracking a parcel (for a shipping company), to finding the relevant policies in case of a car accident (for an insurance company), to ordering dinner in a food delivery app. All of this is possible in more than 80 languages, including many low-resource languages that are locally spoken in Asia and Africa.
2. Machine Translation
Machine Translation allows you to drastically reduce the amount of time it takes for manual translations of documents of any length. NeuralSpace’s translation models are all state-of-the-art that can translate text between more than 100 languages.
3. Transliteration
For languages that don’t use the Latin script, e.g., Arabic, Hindi, Punjabi, Sinhala and many others spoken around the world, typing can be challenging as keyboards/keypads mostly default to Latin characters. That makes creating content in vernacular languages difficult. With NeuralSpace’s Transliteration App, you can create content in these languages using your Latin keypad. It also enables developers to match international databases (of products, for example) to customer queries in local languages that do not use the Latin script. For instance, when a customer in Sri Lanka searches for a new pair of Nike shoes through Amazon’s chat assistant, she will type නයික් සපත්තු and NeuralSpace’s Transliteration would scan Amazon’s English-written database for Nike shoes.
4. Augmentation
Given one example sentence, Augmentation can generate up to ten sentences keeping the intent of the original sentence intact. Its main aim is to help in creating datasets faster and make any kind of text-based language processing models more robust.
5. Language Detection
Often language detection is a prerequisite for any NLP products and solutions. It helps you improve user experience as well as pick language-specific NLP models to process what they are saying. For example, a voice assistant can detect the language the user is speaking in and respond to the user in the same language; or an email automation agent can detect the language of the sender and accordingly pick a language-specific NLP model to process the rest of the text to classify whether the email is spam or not. Through the NeuralSpace Platform, you can detect over 150 languages directly.
With tools such as these and more like Speech to Text (STT), Speaker Identification, Text to Speech (TTS), Short Unlabelled Document Analysis, Long Document Classification and Analysis, it has never been easier to kickstart your journey into NLP now!
Check out our Documentation for all the Apps and features of the NeuralSpace Platform.
Join the NeuralSpace Slack Community to receive updates and discuss about NLP for low-resource languages with fellow developers.
Read more about the NeuralSpace Platform on neuralspace.ai.
