Attention scorers have achieved success in parsing tasks like semantic and syntactic dependency parsing. However, in tasks modeled into parsing, like structured sentiment analysis, "dependency edges" are very sparse which hinders parser performance. Thus we propose a sparse and fuzzy attention scorer with pooling layers which improves parser performance and sets the new state-of-the-art on structured sentiment analysis. We further explore the parsing modeling on structured sentiment analysis with second-order parsing and introduce a novel sparse second-order edge building procedure that leads to significant improvement in parsing performance.

Automatic dialog systems have become a mainstream part of online customer service. Many such systems are built, maintained, and improved by customer service specialists, rather than dialog systems engineers and computer programmers. As conversations between people and machines become commonplace, it is critical to understand what is working, what is not, and what actions can be taken to reduce the frequency of inappropriate system responses. These analyses and recommendations need to be presented in terms that directly reflect the user experience rather than the internal dialog processing. This paper introduces and explains the use of Actionable Conversational Quality Indicators (ACQIs), which are used both to recognize parts of dialogs that can be improved, and to recommend how to improve them. This combines benefits of previous approaches, some of which have focused on producing dialog quality scoring while others have sought to categorize the types of errors the dialog system is making. We demonstrate the effectiveness of using ACQIs on LivePerson internal dialog systems used in commercial customer service applications, and on the publicly available CMU LEGOv2 conversational dataset (Raux et al. 2005). We report on the annotation and analysis of conversational datasets showing which ACQIs are important to fix in various situations. The annotated datasets are then used to build a predictive model which uses a turn-based vector embedding of the message texts and achieves an 79% weighted average f1-measure at the task of finding the correct ACQI for a given conversation. We predict that if such a model worked perfectly, the range of potential improvement actions a bot-builder must consider at each turn could be reduced by an average of 81%.

Language Models (LMs) have been ubiquitously leveraged in various tasks including spoken language understanding (SLU). Spoken language requires careful understanding of speaker interactions, dialog states and speech induced multimodal behaviors to generate a meaningful representation of the conversation. In this work, we propose to dissect SLU into three representative properties:conversational (disfluency, pause, overtalk), channel (speaker-type, turn-tasks) and ASR (insertion, deletion,substitution). We probe BERT based language models (BERT, RoBERTa) trained on spoken transcripts to investigate its ability to understand multifarious properties in absence of any speech cues. Empirical results indicate that LM is surprisingly good at capturing conversational properties such as pause prediction and overtalk detection from lexical tokens. On the downsides, the LM scores low on turn-tasks and ASR errors predictions. Additionally, pre-training the LM on spoken transcripts restrain its linguistic understanding. Finally, we establish the efficacy and transferability of the mentioned properties on two benchmark datasets: Switchboard Dialog Act and Disfluency datasets.

Task-oriented dialog systems are often trained on human/human dialogs, such as collected from Wizard-of-Oz interfaces. However, human/human corpora are frequently too small for supervised training to be effective. This paper investigates two approaches to training agent-bots and user-bots through self-play, in which they autonomously explore an API environment, discovering communication strategies that enable them to solve the task. We give empirical results for both reinforcement learning and game-theoretic equilibrium finding.

Sentiment analysis is analytical technique that uses statistics, natural language processing, and machine learning to determine the emotional meaning of communications. Companies use sentiment analysis to evaluate customer messages, call center interactions, online reviews, social media posts, and other content. Sentiment analysis can track changes in attitudes towards companies, products, or services, or individual features of those products or services. Get the latest insights with our CIO Daily newsletter. One of the most prominent examples of sentiment analysis on the Web today is the Hedonometer, a project of the University of Vermont's Computational Story Lab.

Recommender system has been proven to be significantly crucial in many fields and is widely used by various domains. Most of the conventional recommender systems rely on the numeric rating given by a user to reflect his opinion about a consumed item; however, these ratings are not available in many domains. As a result, a new source of information represented by the user-generated reviews is incorporated in the recommendation process to compensate for the lack of these ratings. The reviews contain prosperous and numerous information related to the whole item or a specific feature that can be extracted using the sentiment analysis field. This paper gives a comprehensive overview to help researchers who aim to work with recommender system and sentiment analysis. It includes a background of the recommender system concept, including phases, approaches, and performance metrics used in recommender systems. Then, it discusses the sentiment analysis concept and highlights the main points in the sentiment analysis, including level, approaches, and focuses on aspect-based sentiment analysis.

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) is an emerging fine-grained sentiment analysis task that aims to extract aspects, classify corresponding sentiment polarities and find opinions as the causes of sentiment. The latest research tends to solve the ABSA task in a unified way with end-to-end frameworks. Yet, these frameworks get fine-tuned from downstream tasks without any task-adaptive modification. Specifically, they do not use task-related knowledge well or explicitly model relations between aspect and opinion terms, hindering them from better performance. In this paper, we propose SentiPrompt to use sentiment knowledge enhanced prompts to tune the language model in the unified framework. We inject sentiment knowledge regarding aspects, opinions, and polarities into prompt and explicitly model term relations via constructing consistency and polarity judgment templates from the ground truth triplets. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach can outperform strong baselines on Triplet Extraction, Pair Extraction, and Aspect Term Extraction with Sentiment Classification by a notable margin.

Speech is the most common way humans express their feelings, and sentiment analysis is the use of tools such as natural language processing and computational algorithms to identify the polarity of these feelings. Even though this field has seen tremendous advancements in the last two decades, the task of effectively detecting under represented sentiments in different kinds of datasets is still a challenging task. In this paper, we use single and bi-modal analysis of short dialog utterances and gain insights on the main factors that aid in sentiment detection, particularly in the underrepresented classes, in datasets with and without inherent sentiment component. Furthermore, we propose an architecture which uses a learning rate scheduler and different monitoring criteria and provides state-of-the-art results for the SWITCHBOARD imbalanced sentiment dataset.

Text classification tasks have improved substantially during the last years by the usage of transformers. However, the majority of researches focus on prose texts, with poetry receiving less attention, specially for Spanish language. In this paper, we propose a semi-supervised learning approach for inferring 21 psychological categories evoked by a corpus of 4572 sonnets, along with 10 affective and lexico-semantic multiclass ones. The subset of poems used for training an evaluation includes 270 sonnets. With our approach, we achieve an AUC beyond 0.7 for 76% of the psychological categories, and an AUC over 0.65 for 60% on the multiclass ones. The sonnets are modelled using transformers, through sentence embeddings, along with lexico-semantic and affective features, obtained by using external lexicons. Consequently, we see that this approach provides an AUC increase of up to 0.12, as opposed to using transformers alone.

Successful conversational search systems can present natural, adaptive and interactive shopping experience for online shopping customers. However, building such systems from scratch faces real word challenges from both imperfect product schema/knowledge and lack of training dialog data.In this work we first propose ConvSearch, an end-to-end conversational search system that deeply combines the dialog system with search. It leverages the text profile to retrieve products, which is more robust against imperfect product schema/knowledge compared with using product attributes alone. We then address the lack of data challenges by proposing an utterance transfer approach that generates dialogue utterances by using existing dialog from other domains, and leveraging the search behavior data from e-commerce retailer. With utterance transfer, we introduce a new conversational search dataset for online shopping. Experiments show that our utterance transfer method can significantly improve the availability of training dialogue data without crowd-sourcing, and the conversational search system significantly outperformed the best tested baseline.