3,772 research outputs found
Survey of the State of the Art in Natural Language Generation: Core tasks, applications and evaluation
This paper surveys the current state of the art in Natural Language
Generation (NLG), defined as the task of generating text or speech from
non-linguistic input. A survey of NLG is timely in view of the changes that the
field has undergone over the past decade or so, especially in relation to new
(usually data-driven) methods, as well as new applications of NLG technology.
This survey therefore aims to (a) give an up-to-date synthesis of research on
the core tasks in NLG and the architectures adopted in which such tasks are
organised; (b) highlight a number of relatively recent research topics that
have arisen partly as a result of growing synergies between NLG and other areas
of artificial intelligence; (c) draw attention to the challenges in NLG
evaluation, relating them to similar challenges faced in other areas of Natural
Language Processing, with an emphasis on different evaluation methods and the
relationships between them.Comment: Published in Journal of AI Research (JAIR), volume 61, pp 75-170. 118
pages, 8 figures, 1 tabl
A retrieval-based dialogue system utilizing utterance and context embeddings
Finding semantically rich and computer-understandable representations for
textual dialogues, utterances and words is crucial for dialogue systems (or
conversational agents), as their performance mostly depends on understanding
the context of conversations. Recent research aims at finding distributed
vector representations (embeddings) for words, such that semantically similar
words are relatively close within the vector-space. Encoding the "meaning" of
text into vectors is a current trend, and text can range from words, phrases
and documents to actual human-to-human conversations. In recent research
approaches, responses have been generated utilizing a decoder architecture,
given the vector representation of the current conversation. In this paper, the
utilization of embeddings for answer retrieval is explored by using
Locality-Sensitive Hashing Forest (LSH Forest), an Approximate Nearest Neighbor
(ANN) model, to find similar conversations in a corpus and rank possible
candidates. Experimental results on the well-known Ubuntu Corpus (in English)
and a customer service chat dataset (in Dutch) show that, in combination with a
candidate selection method, retrieval-based approaches outperform generative
ones and reveal promising future research directions towards the usability of
such a system.Comment: A shorter version is accepted at ICMLA2017 conference;
acknowledgement added; typos correcte
COTA: Improving the Speed and Accuracy of Customer Support through Ranking and Deep Networks
For a company looking to provide delightful user experiences, it is of
paramount importance to take care of any customer issues. This paper proposes
COTA, a system to improve speed and reliability of customer support for end
users through automated ticket classification and answers selection for support
representatives. Two machine learning and natural language processing
techniques are demonstrated: one relying on feature engineering (COTA v1) and
the other exploiting raw signals through deep learning architectures (COTA v2).
COTA v1 employs a new approach that converts the multi-classification task into
a ranking problem, demonstrating significantly better performance in the case
of thousands of classes. For COTA v2, we propose an Encoder-Combiner-Decoder, a
novel deep learning architecture that allows for heterogeneous input and output
feature types and injection of prior knowledge through network architecture
choices. This paper compares these models and their variants on the task of
ticket classification and answer selection, showing model COTA v2 outperforms
COTA v1, and analyzes their inner workings and shortcomings. Finally, an A/B
test is conducted in a production setting validating the real-world impact of
COTA in reducing issue resolution time by 10 percent without reducing customer
satisfaction
Survey on Evaluation Methods for Dialogue Systems
In this paper we survey the methods and concepts developed for the evaluation
of dialogue systems. Evaluation is a crucial part during the development
process. Often, dialogue systems are evaluated by means of human evaluations
and questionnaires. However, this tends to be very cost and time intensive.
Thus, much work has been put into finding methods, which allow to reduce the
involvement of human labour. In this survey, we present the main concepts and
methods. For this, we differentiate between the various classes of dialogue
systems (task-oriented dialogue systems, conversational dialogue systems, and
question-answering dialogue systems). We cover each class by introducing the
main technologies developed for the dialogue systems and then by presenting the
evaluation methods regarding this class
Transformer Neural Networks for Automated Story Generation
Towards the last two-decade Artificial Intelligence (AI) proved its use on tasks such as image recognition, natural language processing, automated driving. As discussed in the Moore’s law the computational power increased rapidly over the few decades (Moore, 1965) and made it possible to use the techniques which were computationally expensive. These techniques include Deep Learning (DL) changed the field of AI and outperformed other models in a lot of fields some of which mentioned above. However, in natural language generation especially for creative tasks that needs the artificial intelligent models to have not only a precise understanding of the given input, but an ability to be creative, fluent and, coherent within a content. One of these tasks is automated story generation which has been an open research area from the early days of artificial intelligence. This study investigates whether the transformer network can outperform state-of-the-art model for automated story generation. A large dataset gathered from Reddit’s WRITING PROMPTS sub forum and processed by the transformer network in order to compare the perplexity and two human evaluation metrics on transformer network and the state-of-the-art model. It was found that the transformer network cannot outperform the state-of-art model and even though it generated viable and novel stories it didn’t pay much attention to the prompts of the generated stories. Also, the results implied that there should be a better automated evaluation metric in order to assess the performance of story generation models
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