The Ubuntu Dialogue Corpus: A Large Dataset for Research in Unstructured Multi-Turn Dialogue Systems

This paper introduces the Ubuntu Dialogue Corpus, a dataset containing almost 1 million multi-turn dialogues, with a total of over 7 million utterances and 100 million words. This provides a unique resource for research into building dialogue managers based on neural language models that can make use of large amounts of unlabeled data. The dataset has both the multi-turn property of conversations in the Dialog State Tracking Challenge datasets, and the unstructured nature of interactions from microblog services such as Twitter. We also describe two neural learning architectures suitable for analyzing this dataset, and provide benchmark performance on the task of selecting the best next response.Comment: SIGDIAL 2015. 10 pages, 5 figures. Update includes link to new version of the dataset, with some added features and bug fixes. See: https://github.com/rkadlec/ubuntu-ranking-dataset-creato

What can the socio-political ethic of ubuntu contribute to contemporary conceptions of "development"?

This research report is a philosophical exploration of what the socio-political ethic of ubuntu can contribute to the three value questions raised by the ‘Development Ethic’ paradigm. It looks into what ubuntu as an ethic is about and promises as a moral theory, and then, applies this moral theory to the three value questions: 1) What is a meaningful life? 2) How ought we to treat nature? 3) What are the foundations of a just society? The response that ubuntu provides to answer these value questions will be taken as the preliminary vision of ‘development’ informed by ubuntu

Becoming, belonging and sharing: Striving to live in the spirit of Ubuntu in Portugal

In this paper I examine the non-formal education programme of the Ubuntu Academy in Portugal, a non-profit organisation that aims to empower and train young adults with strong leadership potential. The participants, who come mostly from African immigrant communities and contexts of social exclusion, are trained to develop and implement social entrepreneur and outreach projects in their communities. I explore the Ubuntu Academy’s use of the Southern African communitarian philosophy of ubuntu and draw on ubuntu literature to argue that this specific education programme’s focus on the notions of humaneness and interdependence encapsulated in the concept of ubuntu has introduced a paradigm shift from an individualistic worldview prevalent in the West to a communitarian form of becoming, belonging and sharing. In this context, I consider the role of testimony and narrative in both promoting personal growth and developing a sense of interdependence and connectedness among people of diverse backgrounds and identities