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Comment by beisner | Hacker News Reader

A research paper published by Apple? About Siri?! Unheard of! Last time I was at an NLP conference wth Apple employees they wouldn't say anything about how Siri speech worked, despite being very inquisitive about everyone else's publications. Good to see some change.

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It's probably safe to assume a lot of that was due to some/most of Siri being licensed from Nuance initially. I mean, who wants to talk about a new product, which most people think is brand new and entirely innovative, just to say "Oh yeah, we paid someone else to work with us to create it."

Not that there's anything wrong with that and it certainly seems like Apple has been investing in-house pretty heavily in recent years for Siri improvement.

I think it has more to do with the fact that they are finally starting to allow their researchers to publish. They were platinum sponsors at INTERSPEECH 2017 this week, and actually published a paper there. I'm pretty sure that was the first time _ever_ despite their recruiters showing up every year.

3 papers at Interspeech 2017, actually :)

The part licensed from Nuance is the speech recognition, not the voice.

Yes, the post I replied to was talking about NLP.

That said, in my limited experience, organizations doing NLP also have something to offer by way of TTS too.

You can read some more discussion on it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14804018.

One of the ideas is that most ML researchers want to publish their work and Apple wasn't allowing it. Allowing ML researchers working at Apple to publish in this journal was they only way they were get more ML researchers to work for them.

Yeah, they do seem to be opening up a bit. They posted their first article on this ML blog a few weeks ago.

It's a quite unattractive proposition for ML researchers to work for a company without being able to publish.

I'm guessing Apple simply had to make this change in order to stay in the game.

There was a lot of internal pushing for publication, apparently. But Apple decided they don't want individual engineers to get credits for ML work that whole teams are working on, so they came up with their ML blog to post papers without individual credit. At least, that's how it was explained by some of the ML researchers to this year's summer intern class.

Why not credit the whole team then, by making them all authors?

Did you ever see the list of authors on publications of CERN? Or take this example: [1].

[1] https://www.nature.com/news/physics-paper-sets-record-with-m...

Right, I totally agree with you! That's just how it was explained a couple months ago. shrug

Also glad to see this. Still curious as to why they wouldn't post it as a research paper on arXiv -- what's the point in reinventing the wheel here? I suppose it's nice for publicity, but would be great if they also played nicely with the ecosystem.

The actual paper is available here: http://www.isca-speech.org/archive/Interspeech_2017/abstract...

This was presented at Interspeech '17 this morning. Maybe the paper is embargoed or something until a later date?

Yeah, Interspeech IS as traditional an ecosystem as it gets in this field.

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