28,225 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
A Conversation is Worth A Thousand Recommendations: A Survey of Holistic Conversational Recommender Systems
Conversational recommender systems (CRS) generate recommendations through an
interactive process. However, not all CRS approaches use human conversations as
their source of interaction data; the majority of prior CRS work simulates
interactions by exchanging entity-level information. As a result, claims of
prior CRS work do not generalise to real-world settings where conversations
take unexpected turns, or where conversational and intent understanding is not
perfect. To tackle this challenge, the research community has started to
examine holistic CRS, which are trained using conversational data collected
from real-world scenarios. Despite their emergence, such holistic approaches
are under-explored.
We present a comprehensive survey of holistic CRS methods by summarizing the
literature in a structured manner. Our survey recognises holistic CRS
approaches as having three components: 1) a backbone language model, the
optional use of 2) external knowledge, and/or 3) external guidance. We also
give a detailed analysis of CRS datasets and evaluation methods in real
application scenarios. We offer our insight as to the current challenges of
holistic CRS and possible future trends.Comment: Accepted by 5th KaRS Workshop @ ACM RecSys 2023, 8 page
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Harnessing agile concepts for the development of intelligent systems
Traditional and current approaches to intelligent systems design, have led to the creation of sophisticated and computationally-intensive packages and environments, for a wide range of applications. This paper proposes methods with which to extend the functionality of such systems, borrowing knowledge management concepts from the field of Agile Manufacturing. As such, this paper proposes that the future of intelligent systems design should be based not only upon the continuing development of artificial intelligence techniques, but also effective methods for harnessing human skills and core competencies to achieve these aims
A Neural Network Approach to Context-Sensitive Generation of Conversational Responses
We present a novel response generation system that can be trained end to end
on large quantities of unstructured Twitter conversations. A neural network
architecture is used to address sparsity issues that arise when integrating
contextual information into classic statistical models, allowing the system to
take into account previous dialog utterances. Our dynamic-context generative
models show consistent gains over both context-sensitive and
non-context-sensitive Machine Translation and Information Retrieval baselines.Comment: A. Sordoni, M. Galley, M. Auli, C. Brockett, Y. Ji, M. Mitchell,
J.-Y. Nie, J. Gao, B. Dolan. 2015. A Neural Network Approach to
Context-Sensitive Generation of Conversational Responses. In Proc. of
NAACL-HLT. Pages 196-20
Approximating Human Evaluation of Social Chatbots with Prompting
Once powerful conversational models have become available for a wide
audience, users started actively engaging in social interactions with this
technology. Such unprecedented interaction experiences may pose considerable
social and psychological risks to the users unless the technology is properly
controlled. This creates an urgent need for scalable and robust evaluation
metrics for conversational chatbots. Existing automatic evaluation metrics
usually focus on objective quality measures and disregard subjective
perceptions of social dimensions. Moreover, most of these approaches operate on
pre-produced dialogs from available benchmark corpora, which implies human
involvement for preparing the material for evaluation and, thus, impeded
scalability of the metrics. To address this limitation, we propose to make use
of the emerging large language models (LLMs) from the GPT-family and describe a
new framework allowing to conduct dialog system evaluation with prompting. With
this framework, we are able to achieve full automation of the evaluation
pipeline and reach impressive correlation with the human judgement (up to
Pearson r=0.95 on system level). The underlying concept is to collect synthetic
chat logs of evaluated bots with a LLM in the other-play setting, where LLM is
carefully conditioned to follow a specific scenario. We further explore
different prompting approaches to produce evaluation scores with the same LLM.
The best-performing prompts, containing few-show demonstrations and
instructions, show outstanding performance on the tested dataset and
demonstrate the ability to generalize to other dialog corpora
Software-based dialogue systems: Survey, taxonomy and challenges
The use of natural language interfaces in the field of human-computer interaction is undergoing intense study through dedicated scientific and industrial research. The latest contributions in the field, including deep learning approaches like recurrent neural networks, the potential of context-aware strategies and user-centred design approaches, have brought back the attention of the community to software-based dialogue systems, generally known as conversational agents or chatbots. Nonetheless, and given the novelty of the field, a generic, context-independent overview on the current state of research of conversational agents covering all research perspectives involved is missing. Motivated by this context, this paper reports a survey of the current state of research of conversational agents through a systematic literature review of secondary studies. The conducted research is designed to develop an exhaustive perspective through a clear presentation of the aggregated knowledge published by recent literature within a variety of domains, research focuses and contexts. As a result, this research proposes a holistic taxonomy of the different dimensions involved in the conversational agents’ field, which is expected to help researchers and to lay the groundwork for future research in the field of natural language interfaces.With the support from the Secretariat for Universities and Research of the Ministry of Business and Knowledge of the Government of Catalonia and the European Social Fund. The corresponding author gratefully acknowledges the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya and Banco Santander for the inancial support of his predoctoral grant FPI-UPC. This paper has been funded by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación under project / funding scheme PID2020-117191RB-I00 / AEI/10.13039/501100011033.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
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