36,772 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
Personalized Dialogue Generation with Diversified Traits
Endowing a dialogue system with particular personality traits is essential to
deliver more human-like conversations. However, due to the challenge of
embodying personality via language expression and the lack of large-scale
persona-labeled dialogue data, this research problem is still far from
well-studied. In this paper, we investigate the problem of incorporating
explicit personality traits in dialogue generation to deliver personalized
dialogues.
To this end, firstly, we construct PersonalDialog, a large-scale multi-turn
dialogue dataset containing various traits from a large number of speakers. The
dataset consists of 20.83M sessions and 56.25M utterances from 8.47M speakers.
Each utterance is associated with a speaker who is marked with traits like Age,
Gender, Location, Interest Tags, etc. Several anonymization schemes are
designed to protect the privacy of each speaker. This large-scale dataset will
facilitate not only the study of personalized dialogue generation, but also
other researches on sociolinguistics or social science.
Secondly, to study how personality traits can be captured and addressed in
dialogue generation, we propose persona-aware dialogue generation models within
the sequence to sequence learning framework. Explicit personality traits
(structured by key-value pairs) are embedded using a trait fusion module.
During the decoding process, two techniques, namely persona-aware attention and
persona-aware bias, are devised to capture and address trait-related
information. Experiments demonstrate that our model is able to address proper
traits in different contexts. Case studies also show interesting results for
this challenging research problem.Comment: Please contact [zhengyinhe1 at 163 dot com] for the PersonalDialog
datase
Affect-LM: A Neural Language Model for Customizable Affective Text Generation
Human verbal communication includes affective messages which are conveyed
through use of emotionally colored words. There has been a lot of research in
this direction but the problem of integrating state-of-the-art neural language
models with affective information remains an area ripe for exploration. In this
paper, we propose an extension to an LSTM (Long Short-Term Memory) language
model for generating conversational text, conditioned on affect categories. Our
proposed model, Affect-LM enables us to customize the degree of emotional
content in generated sentences through an additional design parameter.
Perception studies conducted using Amazon Mechanical Turk show that Affect-LM
generates naturally looking emotional sentences without sacrificing grammatical
correctness. Affect-LM also learns affect-discriminative word representations,
and perplexity experiments show that additional affective information in
conversational text can improve language model prediction
Continuous Interaction with a Virtual Human
Attentive Speaking and Active Listening require that a Virtual Human be capable of simultaneous perception/interpretation and production of communicative behavior. A Virtual Human should be able to signal its attitude and attention while it is listening to its interaction partner, and be able to attend to its interaction partner while it is speaking – and modify its communicative behavior on-the-fly based on what it perceives from its partner. This report presents the results of a four week summer project that was part of eNTERFACE’10. The project resulted in progress on several aspects of continuous interaction such as scheduling and interrupting multimodal behavior, automatic classification of listener responses, generation of response eliciting behavior, and models for appropriate reactions to listener responses. A pilot user study was conducted with ten participants. In addition, the project yielded a number of deliverables that are released for public access
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