Dialogue systems are a popular Natural Language Processing (NLP) task as it is promising in real-life applications. It is also a complicated task since many NLP tasks deserving study are involved. As a result, a multitude of novel works on this task are carried out, and most of them are deep learning-based due to the outstanding performance. In this survey, we mainly focus on the deep learning-based dialogue systems. We comprehensively review state-of-the-art research outcomes in dialogue systems and analyze them from two angles: model type and system type. Specifically, from the angle of model type, we discuss the principles, characteristics, and applications of different models that are widely used in dialogue systems. This will help researchers acquaint these models and see how they are applied in state-of-the-art frameworks, which is rather helpful when designing a new dialogue system. From the angle of system type, we discuss task-oriented and open-domain dialogue systems as two streams of research, providing insight into the hot topics related. Furthermore, we comprehensively review the evaluation methods and datasets for dialogue systems to pave the way for future research. Finally, some possible research trends are identified based on the recent research outcomes. To the best of our knowledge, this survey is the most comprehensive and up-to-date one at present in the area of dialogue systems and dialogue-related tasks, extensively covering the popular frameworks, topics, and datasets. Keywords: Dialogue Systems, Chatbots, Conversational AI, Task-oriented, Open Domain, Chit-chat, Question Answering, Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing, Information Retrieval, Deep Learning, Neural Networks, CNN, RNN, Hierarchical Recurrent Encoder-Decoder, Memory Networks, Attention, Transformer, Pointer Net, CopyNet, Reinforcement Learning, GANs, Knowledge Graph, Survey, Review

Questions of fairness, robustness, and transparency are paramount to address before deploying NLP systems. Central to these concerns is the question of reliability: Can NLP systems reliably treat different demographics fairly and function correctly in diverse and noisy environments? To address this, we argue for the need for reliability testing and contextualize it among existing work on improving accountability. We show how adversarial attacks can be reframed for this goal, via a framework for developing reliability tests. We argue that Figure 1: How DOCTOR can integrate with existing reliability testing -- with an emphasis on interdisciplinary system development workflows. Test (left) and system collaboration -- will enable rigorous development (right) take place in parallel, separate and targeted testing, and aid in the enactment teams. Reliability tests can thus be constructed independent and enforcement of industry standards. of the system development team, either by an internal "red team" or by independent auditors.

Learning from demonstration (LfD) is commonly considered to be a natural and intuitive way to allow novice users to teach motor skills to robots. However, it is important to acknowledge that the effectiveness of LfD is heavily dependent on the quality of teaching, something that may not be assured with novices. It remains an open question as to the most effective way of guiding demonstrators to produce informative demonstrations beyond ad hoc advice for specific teaching tasks. To this end, this paper investigates the use of machine teaching to derive an index for determining the quality of demonstrations and evaluates its use in guiding and training novices to become better teachers. Experiments with a simple learner robot suggest that guidance and training of teachers through the proposed approach can lead to up to 66.5% decrease in error in the learnt skill.

The biggest hurdle to clear when developing machine learning solutions has always been the data. Large-scale, clean, fully-annotated data sets like ImageNet and COCO are not easy to come by, especially for niche tasks. This is especially true of deep learning and will become more true as deep learning is increasingly adopted. To overcome the labeled data bottleneck, researchers and developers are developing a variety of techniques like transfer learning, domain adaptation, synthetic data generation, and many semi- and self-supervised techniques. The world of semi- and self-supervised techniques is a particularly fascinating field as it seems almost like magic.

UNESCO 2019 publication I d Blush if I Could revealed how much gender bias and stereotypes were engineered into Artificial Intelligence-powered voice-assistant applications. Beyond highlighting the overall gender imbalance of teams creating these new tools, it also showed evidence of alarming gender gaps in technology industries, even in countries that are close to achieving gender equality. In this Q&A, Mark West, Project Officer at UNESCO and lead-author of the publication, shares insights on where we stand regarding gender prejudice in AI since the report came out. Two years since the publication came out, where do we stand on the fight against gender prejudice in AI assistants? On the positive side, awareness is much higher than it was when we researched and wrote our report.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is here to stay. Machine learning and AI will continue to evolve how companies are operating and elevating customer experience, and ideally, customer satisfaction. Not everyone is on board though. Einstein once said that the measure of intelligence is the ability to change. "What will we choose when it comes to employing AI as a trusted tool in cultivating and elevating customer experience?"

Machine learning is one of the most popular buzzwords right now, and it has grown in popularity over the years. However, there is a scarcity of qualified Machine Learning professionals on the market, so now is an excellent time to begin your career in this area. This article is written to provide you with a step-by-step guide to getting started with machine learning training in Python since it is regarded as the most common programming language for machine learning. Python is a high-level object-oriented programming language that was first introduced in 1991. Python is a very readable and powerful programming language.

A neural network is a particular model that tries to catch the correlation between the features and the target transforming the dataset according to a layer of neurons. There are several books that have been written around neural networks and it's not in the scope of this article to give you a complete overview of this kind of model. Let me just say that a neural network is made by some layers of neurons. Each neuron gets some inputs, transforms them and returns an output. The output of a neuron can become the input of the neurons of the next layer and so on, building more and more complex architectures.

This work re-implements the OpenAI Gym multi-goal robotic manipulation environment, originally based on the commercial Mujoco engine, onto the open-source Pybullet engine. By comparing the performances of the Hindsight Experience Replay-aided Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient agent on both environments, we demonstrate our successful re-implementation of the original environment. Besides, we provide users with new APIs to access a joint control mode, image observations and goals with customisable camera and a built-in on-hand camera. We further design a set of multi-step, multi-goal, long-horizon and sparse reward robotic manipulation tasks, aiming to inspire new goal-conditioned reinforcement learning algorithms for such challenges. We use a simple, human-prior-based curriculum learning method to benchmark the multi-step manipulation tasks. Discussions about future research opportunities regarding this kind of tasks are also provided.

Currently, a growing number of mature natural language processing applications make people's life more convenient. Such applications are built by source code - the language in software engineering. However, the applications for understanding source code language to ease the software engineering process are under-researched. Simultaneously, the transformer model, especially its combination with transfer learning, has been proven to be a powerful technique for natural language processing tasks. These breakthroughs point out a promising direction for process source code and crack software engineering tasks. This paper describes CodeTrans - an encoder-decoder transformer model for tasks in the software engineering domain, that explores the effectiveness of encoder-decoder transformer models for six software engineering tasks, including thirteen sub-tasks. Moreover, we have investigated the effect of different training strategies, including single-task learning, transfer learning, multi-task learning, and multi-task learning with fine-tuning. CodeTrans outperforms the state-of-the-art models on all the tasks. To expedite future works in the software engineering domain, we have published our pre-trained models of CodeTrans. https://github.com/agemagician/CodeTrans