Chatbol, a chatbot for the Spanish “La Liga”

Segura C., Palau À., Luque J., Costa-Jussà M.R., Banchs R.E. (2019) Chatbol, a Chatbot for the Spanish “La Liga”. In: D'Haro L., Banchs R., Li H. (eds) 9th International Workshop on Spoken Dialogue System Technology. Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering, vol 579. Springer, SingaporeThis work describes the development of a social chatbot for the football domain. The chatbot, named chatbol, aims at answering a wide variety of questions related to the Spanish football league “La Liga”. Chatbol is deployed as a Slack client for text-based input interaction with users. One of the main Chatbol’s components, a NLU block, is trained to extract the intents and associated entities related to user’s questions about football players, teams, trainers and fixtures. The information for the entities is obtained by making sparql queries to Wikidata site in real time. Then, the retrieved data is used to update the specific chatbot responses. As a fallback strategy, a retrieval-based conversational engine is incorporated to the chatbot system. It allows for a wider variety and freedom of responses, still football oriented, for the case when the NLU module was unable to reply with high confidence to the user. The retrieval-based response database is composed of real conversations collected both from a IRC football channel and from football-related excerpts picked up across movie captions, extracted from the OpenSubtitles databasePeer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Raising Security Awareness using Cybersecurity Challenges in Embedded Programming Courses

Security bugs are errors in code that, when exploited, can lead to serious software vulnerabilities. These bugs could allow an attacker to take over an application and steal information. One of the ways to address this issue is by means of awareness training. The Sifu platform was developed in the industry, for the industry, with the aim to raise software developers' awareness of secure coding. This paper extends the Sifu platform with three challenges that specifically address embedded programming courses, and describes how to implement these challenges, while also evaluating the usefulness of these challenges to raise security awareness in an academic setting. Our work presents technical details on the detection mechanisms for software vulnerabilities and gives practical advice on how to implement them. The evaluation of the challenges is performed through two trial runs with a total of 16 participants. Our preliminary results show that the challenges are suitable for academia, and can even potentially be included in official teaching curricula. One major finding is an indicator of the lack of awareness of secure coding by undergraduates. Finally, we compare our results with previous work done in the industry and extract advice for practitioners.Comment: Preprint accepted for publication at the First International Conference on Code Quality (ICCQ 2021

The BG News September 8, 2006

The BGSU campus student newspaper September 8, 2006. Volume 97 - Issue 15https://scholarworks.bgsu.edu/bg-news/8632/thumbnail.jp

The Alestle - Vol. 50 No. 11 - 08/26/1997

Vol. 50 No. 1

Salespeople vs SalesBot: Exploring the Role of Educational Value in Conversational Recommender Systems

Making big purchases requires consumers to research or consult a salesperson to gain domain expertise. However, existing conversational recommender systems (CRS) often overlook users' lack of background knowledge, focusing solely on gathering preferences. In this work, we define a new problem space for conversational agents that aim to provide both product recommendations and educational value through mixed-type mixed-initiative dialog. We introduce SalesOps, a framework that facilitates the simulation and evaluation of such systems by leveraging recent advancements in large language models (LLMs). We build SalesBot and ShopperBot, a pair of LLM-powered agents that can simulate either side of the framework. A comprehensive human study compares SalesBot against professional salespeople, revealing that although SalesBot approaches professional performance in terms of fluency and informativeness, it lags behind in recommendation quality. We emphasize the distinct limitations both face in providing truthful information, highlighting the challenges of ensuring faithfulness in the CRS context. We release our code and make all data available