Hi, how can I help you?: Automating enterprise IT support help desks

Question answering is one of the primary challenges of natural language understanding. In realizing such a system, providing complex long answers to questions is a challenging task as opposed to factoid answering as the former needs context disambiguation. The different methods explored in the literature can be broadly classified into three categories namely: 1) classification based, 2) knowledge graph based and 3) retrieval based. Individually, none of them address the need of an enterprise wide assistance system for an IT support and maintenance domain. In this domain the variance of answers is large ranging from factoid to structured operating procedures; the knowledge is present across heterogeneous data sources like application specific documentation, ticket management systems and any single technique for a general purpose assistance is unable to scale for such a landscape. To address this, we have built a cognitive platform with capabilities adopted for this domain. Further, we have built a general purpose question answering system leveraging the platform that can be instantiated for multiple products, technologies in the support domain. The system uses a novel hybrid answering model that orchestrates across a deep learning classifier, a knowledge graph based context disambiguation module and a sophisticated bag-of-words search system. This orchestration performs context switching for a provided question and also does a smooth hand-off of the question to a human expert if none of the automated techniques can provide a confident answer. This system has been deployed across 675 internal enterprise IT support and maintenance projects.Comment: To appear in IAAI 201

Parallel Attention: A Unified Framework for Visual Object Discovery through Dialogs and Queries

Recognising objects according to a pre-defined fixed set of class labels has been well studied in the Computer Vision. There are a great many practical applications where the subjects that may be of interest are not known beforehand, or so easily delineated, however. In many of these cases natural language dialog is a natural way to specify the subject of interest, and the task achieving this capability (a.k.a, Referring Expression Comprehension) has recently attracted attention. To this end we propose a unified framework, the ParalleL AttentioN (PLAN) network, to discover the object in an image that is being referred to in variable length natural expression descriptions, from short phrases query to long multi-round dialogs. The PLAN network has two attention mechanisms that relate parts of the expressions to both the global visual content and also directly to object candidates. Furthermore, the attention mechanisms are recurrent, making the referring process visualizable and explainable. The attended information from these dual sources are combined to reason about the referred object. These two attention mechanisms can be trained in parallel and we find the combined system outperforms the state-of-art on several benchmarked datasets with different length language input, such as RefCOCO, RefCOCO+ and GuessWhat?!.Comment: 11 page

An investigation of the practices and perceptions of three regular elementary teachers regarding the integration of students with severe disabilities

Regular classrooms have been increasingly identified as the placement of choice for special-needs children, including those diagnosed to have severe disabilities. Undergirding this movement has been an increase in research unfavorable to segregated, homogeneous and favorable to integrated, heterogeneous instructional arrangements. The knowledge base regarding how to facilitate the regular-class integration of severely disabled students, however, is in its infancy. The purpose of this inquiry was to examine regular elementary teachers\u27 practices and perceptions concerning their instruction of students with severe disabilities who had been integrated into their classrooms. Participant observation, interviewing, and constant comparative methods were employed to render a holistic understanding of 3 elementary teachers\u27 strategies, support service usage, and views relative to their integrated education of severely disabled pupils. Instructional strategy examination areas included style, subject matter, purpose, and methods. The investigated teachers were found to have structured and inclusive styles. Identified elements of their structure involved use of routines and relatively fixed schedules. Inclusiveness was reflected in their supportive postures and flexible responses to students and curricula. Employment of meaningful, story-related, and attitude-expanding subject matter was common to the 3 instructors. Their identified purposes involved the facilitation of psychologically safe and peer-interactive environments wherein multilevel curricula were provided. Common elements supporting the latter entailed use of heterogeneously structured cooperative groups, related activities, and whole language instruction. Methodologically, these teachers employed individual behavior management techniques and peer buddies. Three identified categories of support service were provided on a direct (in-class) basis. Included were instruction in whole language, development of integrated students\u27 appropriate behavior, and facilitation of their peer support networks. One common perception was found. All instructors had positive views regarding their experiences as teachers in integrated classrooms. The data suggest that integrated instructional arrangements may be enhanced by structures affording predictability and facilitating peer interaction and collaboration. Classroom climates that promote acceptance of human diversity and all students\u27 positive self-concepts are also indicated. Employment of a wide range of academic-behavioral approaches, including whole language instruction, appears important. Support service provision may encompass development of integrated students\u27 academic-behavioral skills and peer understanding of their needs and goals

From the walking dead to living for Christ: developing a new mindset in a church community

Cornerstone is a United Methodist congregation in Coweta County, Georgia, with a desire to reach its changing community, but which has stagnated recently in doing so. This project thesis builds upon Carol Dweck’s mindset research, which emphasizes an intermediate step between the desire to reach a goal and the realization of that goal breaking the hold of a fixed mindset by introducing key aspects of a growth mindset. This thesis articulates and analyzes the design of a curriculum for lay leaders implemented at Cornerstone that develops this new mindset so that the church can reconnect more fully with its community

Talking Nets: A Multi-Agent Connectionist Approach to Communication and Trust between Individuals

A multi-agent connectionist model is proposed that consists of a collection of individual recurrent networks that communicate with each other, and as such is a network of networks. The individual recurrent networks simulate the process of information uptake, integration and memorization within individual agents, while the communication of beliefs and opinions between agents is propagated along connections between the individual networks. A crucial aspect in belief updating based on information from other agents is the trust in the information provided. In the model, trust is determined by the consistency with the receiving agents’ existing beliefs, and results in changes of the connections between individual networks, called trust weights. Thus activation spreading and weight change between individual networks is analogous to standard connectionist processes, although trust weights take a specific function. Specifically, they lead to a selective propagation and thus filtering out of less reliable information, and they implement Grice’s (1975) maxims of quality and quantity in communication. The unique contribution of communicative mechanisms beyond intra-personal processing of individual networks was explored in simulations of key phenomena involving persuasive communication and polarization, lexical acquisition, spreading of stereotypes and rumors, and a lack of sharing unique information in group decisions

Towards a Hermeneutical Understanding of the Listening Process

This dissertation offers an alternative to the behaviorist understanding of the listening process inherent in the models developed by scholars such as Brownell, Wolvin and Coakley. Using mostly close-text analysis to examine the trends of the literature to date, this dissertation introduces the ideas of Gadamer on philosophical hermeneutics and Fuimara on the connections between listening and hermeneutics to the current discussion. This dissertation argues that the process actually starts when one makes the choice to listen. It distinguishes the choice to listen from the behaviorist concepts of willingness and attention and connects it to Gadamer\u27s understanding of tradition and bias. This work presents a hermeneutical model of the listening process that highlights the choice to listen; it compares this model to behaviorist models which suggest the processes starts when one hears or perceives a message. This dissertation presents the hermeneutical model as yet another way to explain the complexities of listening

Effective techniques to teach listening development and its relationship to reading in grades K-6 with suggestions for helping parents

The purpose in writing this paper is threefold: 1. To review recent literature in order to build listening power through various ways and techniques in Grades K - 6; 2. To list a few structured programs; 3. To suggest games and activities that can be used as supplementary materials

Requirements specifications and recovered architectures as grounded theories

This paper describes the classic grounded theory (GT) process as a method to discover GTs to be subjected to later empirical validation. The paper shows that a well conducted instance of requirements engineering or of architecture recovery resembles an instance of the GT process for the purpose of discovering the requirements specification or recovered architecture artifact that the requirements engineering or architecture recovery produces. Therefore, this artifact resembles a GT