Data-Driven Policy Optimisation for Multi-Domain Task-Oriented Dialogue

Recent developments in machine learning along with a general shift in the public attitude towards digital personal assistants has opened new frontiers for conversational systems. Nevertheless, building data-driven multi-domain conversational agents that act optimally given a dialogue context is an open challenge. The first step towards that goal is developing an efficient way of learning a dialogue policy in new domains. Secondly, it is important to have the ability to collect and utilise human-human conversational data to bootstrap an agent's knowledge. The work presented in this thesis demonstrates how a neural dialogue manager fine-tuned with reinforcement learning presents a viable approach for learning a dialogue policy efficiently and across many domains. The thesis starts by introducing a dialogue management module that learns through interactions to act optimally given a current context of a conversation. The current shift towards neural, parameter-rich systems does not fully address the problem of error noise coming from speech recognition or natural language understanding components. A Bayesian approach is therefore proposed to learn more robust and effective policy management in direct interactions without any prior data. By putting a distribution over model weights, the learning agent is less prone to overfit to particular dialogue realizations and a more efficient exploration policy can be therefore employed. The results show that deep reinforcement learning performs on par with non-parametric models even in a low data regime while significantly reducing the computational complexity compared with the previous state-of-the-art. The deployment of a dialogue manager without any pre-training on human conversations is not a viable option from an industry perspective. However, the progress in building statistical systems, particularly dialogue managers, is hindered by the scale of data available. To address this fundamental obstacle, a novel data-collection pipeline entirely based on crowdsourcing without the need for hiring professional annotators is introduced. The validation of the approach results in the collection of the Multi-Domain Wizard-of-Oz dataset (MultiWOZ), a fully labeled collection of human-human written conversations spanning over multiple domains and topics. The proposed dataset creates a set of new benchmarks (belief tracking, policy optimisation, and response generation) significantly raising the complexity of analysed dialogues. The collected dataset serves as a foundation for a novel reinforcement learning (RL)-based approach for training a multi-domain dialogue manager. A Multi-Action and Slot Dialogue Agent (MASDA) is proposed to combat some limitations: 1) handling complex multi-domain dialogues with multiple concurrent actions present in a single turn; and 2) lack of interpretability, which consequently impedes the use of intermediate signals (e.g., dialogue turn annotations) if such signals are available. MASDA explicitly models system acts and slots using intermediate signals, resulting in an improved task-based end-to-end framework. The model can also select concurrent actions in a single turn, thus enriching the representation of the generated responses. The proposed framework allows for RL training of dialogue task completion metrics when dealing with concurrent actions. The results demonstrate the advantages of both 1) handling concurrent actions and 2) exploiting intermediate signals: MASDA outperforms previous end-to-end frameworks while also offering improved scalability.EPSR

An exploration of the cultural context and consequences of perceptions of illness and health-seeking behaviour of the Baloch

Human beliefs about health and illness structure the explanations for health and illness in a society and these explanations rationalise preventive or therapeutic strategies. The purpose of this research was to discover, identify and understand the perceptions of health, illness and health seeking behaviour of the Baloch people in a cultural perspective. More specifically, it was to document their perception regarding the origin and cause of illness and disease as revealed in their system of disease-classification and their etiological categories. It was also to describe the context in which Baloch access the traditional health care system as well as conventional health care. Participant observations and in-depth interviews were the tools for data collection in this ethnographic study. Four districts of Pakistani Balochistan were selected for fieldwork. Traditional or folk healers of different categories, medical professionals, sufferers, family heads, community elders, tribal chiefs and medical doctors were interviewed in depth during fieldwork and many socio-cultural phenomena and ritual healing practices were participated in and observed. It was observed that Baloch beliefs regarding health and illness revolve either on the concept of natural causes that are mainly due to humoral imbalance or supernatural causes: spirit possession, sorcery or evil eye. In contemporary Balochistan, despite the availability of the basic health care system in the majority of Baloch settlements, for all practical purposes, Baloch use their traditional medical practices alongside biomedicine. These medical practices mainly consist of herbal remedies and spiritual healing practices. Folk medical beliefs are inseparable from other elements of Baloch cultural life and in this context health planners and medical practitioners in Balochistan, mutually can do much to balance and integrate biomedicine and folk and traditional medicine. Working together, they can optimise the benefits for their client populations

The polemics and discourse of conservation in Nepal: a case study of Sonaha Indigenous Minorities and Bardia National Park

This thesis presents a critical ethnographic investigation into contestations between the Sonaha indigenous minorities and the Bardia National Park regime in Nepal. Sonahas routinely encounter and resist the powerful and occasionally combative force of the state as mediated through the competing discourses and practices of conservation and indigenous rights/identity. This contestation is reframed as a multifaceted politics of space within which a ‘bio-cultural social space’ perspective is postulated as a basis for a ‘just’ conservation

Corporations and the Discourse of Sustainability

The contemporary notion of sustainability is emerging as a political response to ecological and social problems associated with human development. It is a contested concept - eco-modernists interpret it as a call to rethink or adjust industrial production systems while others interpret it as a fundamental challenge to the dominant development paradigm. Corporations are playing a key role in shaping the discourse. Many argue that since corporations have enormous influence in the global political economy, they must take the lead in the search for sustainability. The World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) promotes eco-efficiency - an eco-modernist stance - as the primary business contribution to sustainability. However, the potential of the corporate focus on efficiency to contribute to sustainability is a subject of debate. In this thesis, I use a heterogeneous methodological approach to explore the interaction between corporations (with a focus on multinational corporations) and the discourse of sustainability in order to identify the potential for positive outcomes. I consider the compatibility of aspects of corporate identity and organisational structure to the ethos of sustainability. This leads to an examination of the meeting between corporations and sustainability as a reflexive process, paying particular attention to the ways in which language and mythology serve to uphold or transform existing power relations. I also explore forms of knowledge relevant to sustainability, comparing those that are typically emphasized in corporate enterprise with traditional, Indigenous and local ways of knowing that are essential to sustainability. The knowledge of classical equestrianism is used as an example in this analysis. Practical ways of including all these essential perspectives in the discourse are considered. The thesis concludes that certain aspects of corporate identity, structure and function are incompatible with the ideals of sustainability and that these disparities must be borne in mind as corporations attempt to embrace sustainability. I contend that sustainability requires network approaches that integrate strong and weak relations as well as diverse values and forms of knowledge. Sustainability can only be achieved with broad civic engagement that allows the synergistic combination of all values and knowledges relevant to sustainability. Furthermore, I argue that while corporations’ orientation towards market-based strategies has significant potential to support sustainability, it is limited since the market is fundamentally constituted by a network of weak ties. Therefore the thesis argues that while corporations can provide significant benefits in terms of sustainability, they cannot be expected to lead the sustainability agenda as it requires discursive plurality. The efficacy of the corporate contribution to sustainability will be greatly enhanced if companies are guided by strong democratic processes of deliberation and community engagement