Task oriented dialogue (TOD) requires the complex interleaving of a number of individually controllable components with strong guarantees for explainability and verifiability. This has made it difficult to adopt the multi-turn multi-domain dialogue generation capabilities of streamlined end-to-end open-domain dialogue systems. In this paper, we present a new framework, DLGNet-Task, a unified task-oriented dialogue system which employs autoregressive transformer networks such as DLGNet and GPT-2/3 to complete user tasks in multi-turn multi-domain conversations. Our framework enjoys the controllable, verifiable, and explainable outputs of modular approaches, and the low development, deployment and maintenance cost of end-to-end systems. Treating open-domain system components as additional TOD system modules allows DLGNet-Task to learn the joint distribution of the inputs and outputs of all the functional blocks of existing modular approaches such as, natural language understanding (NLU), state tracking, action policy, as well as natural language generation (NLG). Rather than training the modules individually, as is common in real-world systems, we trained them jointly with appropriate module separations. When evaluated on the MultiWOZ2.1 dataset, DLGNet-Task shows comparable performance to the existing state-of-the-art approaches. Furthermore, using DLGNet-Task in conversational AI systems reduces the level of effort required for developing, deploying, and maintaining intelligent assistants at scale.

Subjectivity is the expression of internal opinions or beliefs which cannot be objectively observed or verified, and has been shown to be important for sentiment analysis and word-sense disambiguation. Furthermore, subjectivity is an important aspect of user-generated data. In spite of this, subjectivity has not been investigated in contexts where such data is widespread, such as in question answering (QA). We therefore investigate the relationship between subjectivity and QA, while developing a new dataset. We compare and contrast with analyses from previous work, and verify that findings regarding subjectivity still hold when using recently developed NLP architectures. We find that subjectivity is also an important feature in the case of QA, albeit with more intricate interactions between subjectivity and QA performance. For instance, a subjective question may or may not be associated with a subjective answer. We release an English QA dataset (SubjQA) based on customer reviews, containing subjectivity annotations for questions and answer spans across 6 distinct domains.

Existing benchmarks used to evaluate the performance of end-to-end neural dialog systems lack a key component: natural variation present in human conversations. Most datasets are constructed through crowdsourcing, where the crowd workers follow a fixed template of instructions while enacting the role of a user/agent. This results in straight-forward, somewhat routine, and mostly trouble-free conversations, as crowd workers do not think to represent the full range of actions that occur naturally with real users. In this work, we investigate the impact of naturalistic variation on two goal-oriented datasets: bAbI dialog task and Stanford Multi-Domain Dataset (SMD). We also propose new and more effective testbeds for both datasets, by introducing naturalistic variation by the user. We observe that there is a significant drop in performance (more than 60% in Ent. F1 on SMD and 85% in per-dialog accuracy on bAbI task) of recent state-of-the-art end-to-end neural methods such as BossNet and GLMP on both datasets.

It is challenging to perform lifelong language learning (LLL) on a stream of different tasks without any performance degradation comparing to the multi-task counterparts. To address this issue, we present Lifelong Language Knowledge Distillation (L2KD), a simple but efficient method that can be easily applied to existing LLL architectures in order to mitigate the degradation. Specifically, when the LLL model is trained on a new task, we assign a teacher model to first learn the new task, and pass the knowledge to the LLL model via knowledge distillation. Therefore, the LLL model can better adapt to the new task while keeping the previously learned knowledge. Experiments show that the proposed L2KD consistently improves previous state-of-the-art models, and the degradation comparing to multi-task models in LLL tasks is well mitigated for both sequence generation and text classification tasks.

India locked down 1.3 billion people on March 25, 2020 in the wake of COVID-19 pandemic. The economic cost of it was estimated at USD 98 billion, while the social costs are still unknown. This study investigated how government formed reactive policies to fight coronavirus across its policy sectors. Primary data was collected from the Press Information Bureau (PIB) in the form press releases of government plans, policies, programme initiatives and achievements. A text corpus of 260,852 words was created from 396 documents from the PIB. An unsupervised machine-based topic modelling using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) algorithm was performed on the text corpus. It was done to extract high probability topics in the policy sectors. The interpretation of the extracted topics was made through a nudge theoretic lens to derive the critical policy heuristics of the government. Results showed that most interventions were targeted to generate endogenous nudge by using external triggers. Notably, the nudges from the Prime Minister of India was critical in creating herd effect on lockdown and social distancing norms across the nation. A similar effect was also observed around the public health (e.g., masks in public spaces; Yoga and Ayurveda for immunity), transport (e.g., old trains converted to isolation wards), micro, small and medium enterprises (e.g., rapid production of PPE and masks), science and technology sector (e.g., diagnostic kits, robots and nano-technology), home affairs (e.g., surveillance and lockdown), urban (e.g. drones, GIS-tools) and education (e.g., online learning). A conclusion was drawn on leveraging these heuristics are crucial for lockdown easement planning.

End-to-end task-oriented dialogue systems aim to generate system responses directly from plain text inputs. There are two challenges for such systems: one is how to effectively incorporate external knowledge bases (KBs) into the learning framework; the other is how to accurately capture the semantics of dialogue history. In this paper, we address these two challenges by exploiting the graph structural information in the knowledge base and in the dependency parsing tree of the dialogue. To effectively leverage the structural information in dialogue history, we propose a new recurrent cell architecture which allows representation learning on graphs. To exploit the relations between entities in KBs, the model combines multi-hop reasoning ability based on the graph structure. Experimental results show that the proposed model achieves consistent improvement over state-of-the-art models on two different task-oriented dialogue datasets.

Analysis of a large amount of data has always brought value to institutions and organizations. Lately, people's opinions expressed through text have become a very important aspect of this analysis. In response to this challenge, a natural language processing technique known as Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) has emerged. Having the ability to extract the polarity for each aspect of opinions separately, ABSA has found itself useful in a wide range of domains. Education is one of the domains in which ABSA can be successfully utilized. Being able to understand and find out what students like and don't like most about a course, professor, or teaching methodology can be of great importance for the respective institutions. While this task represents a unique NLP challenge, many studies have proposed different approaches to tackle the problem. In this work, we present a comprehensive review of the existing work in ABSA with a focus in the education domain. A wide range of methodologies are discussed and conclusions are drawn.

Automated Machine learning or autoML is used for automating the complete process of machine learning for real-world problems to make the process easier and more efficient. Over the years researchers have developed ways of automating processes by developing tools like AutoKeras, AutoSklearn and even no-coding platforms like WEKA and H2o. One such area of automation is in the field of natural language processing. With the development of AutoNLP, it is now super easy to build a model like sentiment analysis with very few basic lines of code and get a good output. With automation like these, it allows everyone to be a part of the machine learning community and does not restrict machine learning to only developers and engineers.

An expanding field of substantive interest for the theory of the law and the practice-of-law entails Legal Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining (LSAOM), consisting of two often intertwined phenomena and actions underlying legal discussions and narratives: (1) Sentiment Analysis (SA) for the detection of expressed or implied sentiment about a legal matter within the context of a legal milieu, and (2) Opinion Mining (OM) for the identification and illumination of explicit or implicit opinion accompaniments immersed within legal discourse. Efforts to undertake LSAOM have historically been performed by human hand and cognition, and only thinly aided in more recent times by the use of computer-based approaches. Advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) involving especially Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML) are increasingly bolstering how automation can systematically perform either or both of Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining, all of which is being inexorably carried over into engagement within a legal context for improving LSAOM capabilities. This research paper examines the evolving infusion of AI into Legal Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining and proposes an alignment with the Levels of Autonomy (LoA) of AI Legal Reasoning (AILR), plus provides additional insights regarding AI LSAOM in its mechanizations and potential impact to the study of law and the practicing of law.

We seek to create agents that both act and communicate with other agents in pursuit of a goal. Towards this end, we extend LIGHT (Urbanek et al. 2019)---a large-scale crowd-sourced fantasy text-game---with a dataset of quests. These contain natural language motivations paired with in-game goals and human demonstrations; completing a quest might require dialogue or actions (or both). We introduce a reinforcement learning system that (1) incorporates large-scale language modeling-based and commonsense reasoning-based pre-training to imbue the agent with relevant priors; and (2) leverages a factorized action space of action commands and dialogue, balancing between the two. We conduct zero-shot evaluations using held-out human expert demonstrations, showing that our agents are able to act consistently and talk naturally with respect to their motivations.