Discourse & Dialogue
Causal-aware Safe Policy Improvement for Task-oriented dialogue
Ramachandran, Govardana Sachithanandam, Hashimoto, Kazuma, Xiong, Caiming
The recent success of reinforcement learning's (RL) in solving complex tasks is most often attributed to its capacity to explore and exploit an environment where it has been trained. Sample efficiency is usually not an issue since cheap simulators are available to sample data on-policy. On the other hand, task oriented dialogues are usually learnt from offline data collected using human demonstrations. Collecting diverse demonstrations and annotating them is expensive. Unfortunately, use of RL methods trained on off-policy data are prone to issues of bias and generalization, which are further exacerbated by stochasticity in human response and non-markovian belief state of a dialogue management system. To this end, we propose a batch RL framework for task oriented dialogue policy learning: causal aware safe policy improvement (CASPI). This method gives guarantees on dialogue policy's performance and also learns to shape rewards according to intentions behind human responses, rather than just mimicking demonstration data; this couple with batch-RL helps overall with sample efficiency of the framework. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this framework on a dialogue-context-to-text Generation and end-to-end dialogue task of the Multiwoz2.0 dataset. The proposed method outperforms the current state of the art on these metrics, in both case. In the end-to-end case, our method trained only on 10\% of the data was able to out perform current state in three out of four evaluation metrics.
Sentiment Analysis using Logistic Regression and Naive Bayes
In supervised machine learning, you usually have an input X, which goes into your prediction function to get your Y . You can then compare your prediction with the true value Y. This gives you your cost which you use to update the parameters θ. Sentiment analysis (also known as opinion mining or emotion AI) refers to the use of natural language processing, text analysis, computational linguistics, and biometrics to systematically identify, extract, quantify, and study affective states and subjective information. So, let's start sentiment analysis using Logistic Regression We will be using the sample twitter data set for this exercise.
Video Sentiment Analysis with Bimodal Information-augmented Multi-Head Attention
Wu, Ting, Peng, Junjie, Zhang, Wenqiang, Zhang, Huiran, Ma, Chuanshuai, Huang, Yansong
Sentiment analysis is the basis of intelligent human-computer interaction. As one of the frontier research directions of artificial intelligence, it can help computers better identify human intentions and emotional states so that provide more personalized services. However, as human present sentiments by spoken words, gestures, facial expressions and others which involve variable forms of data including text, audio, video, etc., it poses many challenges to this study. Due to the limitations of unimodal sentiment analysis, recent research has focused on the sentiment analysis of videos containing time series data of multiple modalities. When analyzing videos with multimodal data, the key problem is how to fuse these heterogeneous data. In consideration that the contribution of each modality is different, current fusion methods tend to extract the important information of single modality prior to fusion, which ignores the consistency and complementarity of bimodal interaction and has influences on the final decision. To solve this problem, a video sentiment analysis method using multi-head attention with bimodal information augmented is proposed. Based on bimodal interaction, more important bimodal features are assigned larger weights. In this way, different feature representations are adaptively assigned corresponding attention for effective multimodal fusion. Extensive experiments were conducted on both Chinese and English public datasets. The results show that our approach outperforms the existing methods and can give an insight into the contributions of bimodal interaction among three modalities.
Sentiment Analysis (Opinion Mining) with Python -- NLP Tutorial
Check out our editorial recommendations on the best machine learning books. A "sentiment" is a generally binary opposition in opinions and expresses the feelings in the form of emotions, attitudes, opinions, and so on. It can express many opinions. By using machine learning methods and natural language processing, we can extract the personal information of a document and attempt to classify it according to its polarity, such as positive, neutral, or negative, making sentiment analysis instrumental in determining the overall opinion of a defined objective, for instance, a selling item or predicting stock markets for a given company. Sentiment analysis is challenging and far from being solved since most languages are highly complex (objectivity, subjectivity, negation, vocabulary, grammar, and others).
Sentiment Analysis (Opinion Mining) with Python -- NLP Tutorial
Check out our editorial recommendations on the best machine learning books. A "sentiment" is a generally binary opposition in opinions and expresses the feelings in the form of emotions, attitudes, opinions, and so on. It can express many opinions. By using machine learning methods and natural language processing, we can extract the personal information of a document and attempt to classify it according to its polarity, such as positive, neutral, or negative, making sentiment analysis instrumental in determining the overall opinion of a defined objective, for instance, a selling item or predicting stock markets for a given company. Sentiment analysis is challenging and far from being solved since most languages are highly complex (objectivity, subjectivity, negation, vocabulary, grammar, and others).
Towards Automatic Evaluation of Dialog Systems: A Model-Free Off-Policy Evaluation Approach
Jiang, Haoming, Dai, Bo, Yang, Mengjiao, Zhao, Tuo, Wei, Wei
Reliable automatic evaluation of dialogue systems under an interactive environment has long been overdue. An ideal environment for evaluating dialog systems, also known as the Turing test, needs to involve human interaction, which is usually not affordable for large-scale experiments. Though researchers have attempted to use metrics (e.g., perplexity, BLEU) in language generation tasks or some model-based reinforcement learning methods (e.g., self-play evaluation) for automatic evaluation, these methods only show a very weak correlation with the actual human evaluation in practice. To bridge such a gap, we propose a new framework named ENIGMA for estimating human evaluation scores based on recent advances of off-policy evaluation in reinforcement learning. ENIGMA only requires a handful of pre-collected experience data, and therefore does not involve human interaction with the target policy during the evaluation, making automatic evaluations feasible. More importantly, ENIGMA is model-free and agnostic to the behavior policies for collecting the experience data (see details in Section 2), which significantly alleviates the technical difficulties of modeling complex dialogue environments and human behaviors. Our experiments show that ENIGMA significantly outperforms existing methods in terms of correlation with human evaluation scores.
Improving Longer-range Dialogue State Tracking
Zhang, Ye, Cao, Yuan, Mahdieh, Mahdis, Zhao, Jefferey, Wu, Yonghui
Dialogue state tracking (DST) is a pivotal component in task-oriented dialogue systems. While it is relatively easy for a DST model to capture belief states in short conversations, the task of DST becomes more challenging as the length of a dialogue increases due to the injection of more distracting contexts. In this paper, we aim to improve the overall performance of DST with a special focus on handling longer dialogues. We tackle this problem from three perspectives: 1) A model designed to enable hierarchical slot status prediction; 2) Balanced training procedure for generic and task-specific language understanding; 3) Data perturbation which enhances the model's ability in handling longer conversations. We conduct experiments on the MultiWOZ benchmark, and demonstrate the effectiveness of each component via a set of ablation tests, especially on longer conversations. Dialog state tracking (DST) is a key component in modern task-oriented dialogue (ToD) systems.
How Pandemic Spread in News: Text Analysis Using Topic Model
Researches about COVID-19 has increased largely, no matter in the biology field or the others. This research conducted a text analysis using LDA topic model. We firstly scraped totally 1127 articles and 5563 comments on SCMP covering COVID-19 from Jan 20 to May 19, then we trained the LDA model and tuned parameters based on the Cv coherence as the model evaluation method. With the optimal model, dominant topics, representative documents of each topic and the inconsistence between articles and comments are analyzed. 3 possible improvements are discussed at last.
Integrating Pre-trained Model into Rule-based Dialogue Management
Quan, Jun, Yang, Meng, Gan, Qiang, Xiong, Deyi, Liu, Yiming, Dong, Yuchen, Ouyang, Fangxin, Tian, Jun, Deng, Ruiling, Li, Yongzhi, Yang, Yang, Jiang, Daxin
Rule-based dialogue management is still the most popular solution for industrial task-oriented dialogue systems for their interpretablility. However, it is hard for developers to maintain the dialogue logic when the scenarios get more and more complex. On the other hand, data-driven dialogue systems, usually with end-to-end structures, are popular in academic research and easier to deal with complex conversations, but such methods require plenty of training data and the behaviors are less interpretable. In this paper, we propose a method to leverages the strength of both rule-based and data-driven dialogue managers (DM). We firstly introduce the DM of Carina Dialog System (CDS, an advanced industrial dialogue system built by Microsoft). Then we propose the "model-trigger" design to make the DM trainable thus scalable to scenario changes. Furthermore, we integrate pre-trained models and empower the DM with few-shot capability. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and strong few-shot capability of our method.
An AutoML-based Approach to Multimodal Image Sentiment Analysis
Lopes, Vasco, Gaspar, António, Alexandre, Luís A., Cordeiro, João
Sentiment analysis is a research topic focused on analysing data to extract information related to the sentiment that it causes. Applications of sentiment analysis are wide, ranging from recommendation systems, and marketing to customer satisfaction. Recent approaches evaluate textual content using Machine Learning techniques that are trained over large corpora. However, as social media grown, other data types emerged in large quantities, such as images. Sentiment analysis in images has shown to be a valuable complement to textual data since it enables the inference of the underlying message polarity by creating context and connections. Multimodal sentiment analysis approaches intend to leverage information of both textual and image content to perform an evaluation. Despite recent advances, current solutions still flounder in combining both image and textual information to classify social media data, mainly due to subjectivity, inter-class homogeneity and fusion data differences. In this paper, we propose a method that combines both textual and image individual sentiment analysis into a final fused classification based on AutoML, that performs a random search to find the best model. Our method achieved state-of-the-art performance in the B-T4SA dataset, with 95.19% accuracy.