NAVER and Seoul National University Collaborate to Create NLP Model

11 mai 2021

Seoul National University and the computer company NAVER have signed a partnership agreement to develop a large-scale artificial intelligence in the field of linguistics, capable of surpassing the performance of GPT-3. For three years, researchers from both institutions will work on this project. NAVER has already invested in several AI projects, as shown by its involvement in the launch of an international research centrein Vietnam.

A partnership to develop linguistic artificial intelligence

A hundred researchers from Seoul National University and NAVER are working on a linguistic AI project capable of understanding the Korean language. The tool could recognize the Hangeul, the official alphabet of Korean, but also the sounds of a person speaking this language. This platform will be designed thanks to the cooperation of the two Korean organizations.

In-hyuk Choi, COO of Naver, said:

“Based on a new model of industry-university cooperation, we look forward to a strong research synergy that researchers from NAVER and Seoul National University will create together.”

One of the ambitions of the project is to exceed the performance of GPT-3, the natural language processing (NLP) model developed by OpenAI. With this newest partnership, NAVER hopes to scale up the Korean language model while developing an algorithm that can simultaneously analyze language features as well as text or speech information from a person writing or speaking it.

Close collaboration to help students become AI experts

The two partners will pool their infrastructures and data, and the researchers will share the results of their studies by organizing two workshops per year. In particular, NAVER is counting on the supercomputer installed in October 2020 in a Korean company to design an NLP model. This supercomputer can be used by the researchers of the Korean university in several projects, including the NLP model that they want to develop.

As part of the partnership, the Korean group’s experts will provide all their knowledge to the students of Seoul National University so that they, in turn, can become AI specialists. NAVER also said that it will offer several internship opportunities and increase cooperation projects with the university.

At the same time, Seoul National University researchers will actively participate in AI research with NAVER. Jang Byeong-Tak, director of AI research at Seoul National University, said of the importance of training in the AI sector: