Former D-Lab instructor and consultant Chris Hench, now a research scientist in Alexa AI’s Applied Modeling and Data Science group at Amazon, has been collaborating on a project that made it possible for Amazon’s Alexa to feature three new languages: Hindi, U.S. Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese. Read more details regarding the challenges the team faced regarding Alexa’s Natural Language Understanding (NLU) models and how they used new bootstrapping tools, such as grammar induction and guided resampling, to approach them here.

Author: 

Iliana Lopez Yanez

Iliana Lopez Yanez started at the D-Lab as a UTech member during her Freshman year in Fall 2015. She is currently part of the Workshop Production and Scheduling teams.

She speaks English, Spanish and French. She is currently a declared Psychology major, but is still debating on whether or not to add a minor.

Previous experience with research and data involves a UCSD Extension Program at the Biosphere 2 facility in Oracle, AZ. Currently, she is a Research Assistant at the Emotion and Social Interaction Laboratory at UC Berkeley.