11,824 research outputs found
Towards responsive Sensitive Artificial Listeners
This paper describes work in the recently started project SEMAINE, which aims to build a set of Sensitive Artificial Listeners – conversational agents designed to sustain an interaction with a human user despite limited verbal skills, through robust recognition and generation of non-verbal behaviour in real-time, both when the agent is speaking and listening. We report on data collection and on the design of a system architecture in view of real-time responsiveness
Deep Reinforcement Learning for Dialogue Generation
Recent neural models of dialogue generation offer great promise for
generating responses for conversational agents, but tend to be shortsighted,
predicting utterances one at a time while ignoring their influence on future
outcomes. Modeling the future direction of a dialogue is crucial to generating
coherent, interesting dialogues, a need which led traditional NLP models of
dialogue to draw on reinforcement learning. In this paper, we show how to
integrate these goals, applying deep reinforcement learning to model future
reward in chatbot dialogue. The model simulates dialogues between two virtual
agents, using policy gradient methods to reward sequences that display three
useful conversational properties: informativity (non-repetitive turns),
coherence, and ease of answering (related to forward-looking function). We
evaluate our model on diversity, length as well as with human judges, showing
that the proposed algorithm generates more interactive responses and manages to
foster a more sustained conversation in dialogue simulation. This work marks a
first step towards learning a neural conversational model based on the
long-term success of dialogues
Evorus: A Crowd-powered Conversational Assistant Built to Automate Itself Over Time
Crowd-powered conversational assistants have been shown to be more robust
than automated systems, but do so at the cost of higher response latency and
monetary costs. A promising direction is to combine the two approaches for high
quality, low latency, and low cost solutions. In this paper, we introduce
Evorus, a crowd-powered conversational assistant built to automate itself over
time by (i) allowing new chatbots to be easily integrated to automate more
scenarios, (ii) reusing prior crowd answers, and (iii) learning to
automatically approve response candidates. Our 5-month-long deployment with 80
participants and 281 conversations shows that Evorus can automate itself
without compromising conversation quality. Crowd-AI architectures have long
been proposed as a way to reduce cost and latency for crowd-powered systems;
Evorus demonstrates how automation can be introduced successfully in a deployed
system. Its architecture allows future researchers to make further innovation
on the underlying automated components in the context of a deployed open domain
dialog system.Comment: 10 pages. To appear in the Proceedings of the Conference on Human
Factors in Computing Systems 2018 (CHI'18
Spoken content retrieval: A survey of techniques and technologies
Speech media, that is, digital audio and video containing spoken content, has blossomed in recent years. Large collections are accruing on the Internet as well as in private and enterprise settings. This growth has motivated extensive research on techniques and technologies that facilitate reliable indexing and retrieval. Spoken content retrieval (SCR) requires the combination of audio and speech processing technologies with methods from information retrieval (IR). SCR research initially investigated planned speech structured in document-like units, but has subsequently shifted focus to more informal spoken content produced spontaneously, outside of the studio and in conversational settings. This survey provides an overview of the field of SCR encompassing component technologies, the relationship of SCR to text IR and automatic speech recognition and user interaction issues. It is aimed at researchers with backgrounds in speech technology or IR who are seeking deeper insight on how these fields are integrated to support research and development, thus addressing the core challenges of SCR
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
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