Listening between the Lines: Learning Personal Attributes from Conversations

Open-domain dialogue agents must be able to converse about many topics while incorporating knowledge about the user into the conversation. In this work we address the acquisition of such knowledge, for personalization in downstream Web applications, by extracting personal attributes from conversations. This problem is more challenging than the established task of information extraction from scientific publications or Wikipedia articles, because dialogues often give merely implicit cues about the speaker. We propose methods for inferring personal attributes, such as profession, age or family status, from conversations using deep learning. Specifically, we propose several Hidden Attribute Models, which are neural networks leveraging attention mechanisms and embeddings. Our methods are trained on a per-predicate basis to output rankings of object values for a given subject-predicate combination (e.g., ranking the doctor and nurse professions high when speakers talk about patients, emergency rooms, etc). Experiments with various conversational texts including Reddit discussions, movie scripts and a collection of crowdsourced personal dialogues demonstrate the viability of our methods and their superior performance compared to state-of-the-art baselines.Comment: published in WWW'1

Knowledge Graph semantic enhancement of input data for improving AI

Intelligent systems designed using machine learning algorithms require a large number of labeled data. Background knowledge provides complementary, real world factual information that can augment the limited labeled data to train a machine learning algorithm. The term Knowledge Graph (KG) is in vogue as for many practical applications, it is convenient and useful to organize this background knowledge in the form of a graph. Recent academic research and implemented industrial intelligent systems have shown promising performance for machine learning algorithms that combine training data with a knowledge graph. In this article, we discuss the use of relevant KGs to enhance input data for two applications that use machine learning -- recommendation and community detection. The KG improves both accuracy and explainability

Representation Learning for Attributed Multiplex Heterogeneous Network

Network embedding (or graph embedding) has been widely used in many real-world applications. However, existing methods mainly focus on networks with single-typed nodes/edges and cannot scale well to handle large networks. Many real-world networks consist of billions of nodes and edges of multiple types, and each node is associated with different attributes. In this paper, we formalize the problem of embedding learning for the Attributed Multiplex Heterogeneous Network and propose a unified framework to address this problem. The framework supports both transductive and inductive learning. We also give the theoretical analysis of the proposed framework, showing its connection with previous works and proving its better expressiveness. We conduct systematical evaluations for the proposed framework on four different genres of challenging datasets: Amazon, YouTube, Twitter, and Alibaba. Experimental results demonstrate that with the learned embeddings from the proposed framework, we can achieve statistically significant improvements (e.g., 5.99-28.23% lift by F1 scores; p<<0.01, t-test) over previous state-of-the-art methods for link prediction. The framework has also been successfully deployed on the recommendation system of a worldwide leading e-commerce company, Alibaba Group. Results of the offline A/B tests on product recommendation further confirm the effectiveness and efficiency of the framework in practice.Comment: Accepted to KDD 2019. Website: https://sites.google.com/view/gatn

Adapting Visual Question Answering Models for Enhancing Multimodal Community Q&A Platforms

Question categorization and expert retrieval methods have been crucial for information organization and accessibility in community question & answering (CQA) platforms. Research in this area, however, has dealt with only the text modality. With the increasing multimodal nature of web content, we focus on extending these methods for CQA questions accompanied by images. Specifically, we leverage the success of representation learning for text and images in the visual question answering (VQA) domain, and adapt the underlying concept and architecture for automated category classification and expert retrieval on image-based questions posted on Yahoo! Chiebukuro, the Japanese counterpart of Yahoo! Answers. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to tackle the multimodality challenge in CQA, and to adapt VQA models for tasks on a more ecologically valid source of visual questions. Our analysis of the differences between visual QA and community QA data drives our proposal of novel augmentations of an attention method tailored for CQA, and use of auxiliary tasks for learning better grounding features. Our final model markedly outperforms the text-only and VQA model baselines for both tasks of classification and expert retrieval on real-world multimodal CQA data.Comment: Submitted for review at CIKM 201