Natural language processing, or NLP for short, is best described as "AI for speech and text." The magic behind voice commands, speech and text translation, sentiment analysis, text summarization, and many other linguistic applications and analyses, natural language processing has been improved dramatically through deep learning. The Python language provides a convenient front-end to all varieties of machine learning including NLP. In fact, there is an embarrassment of NLP riches to choose from in the Python ecosystem. In this article we'll explore each of the NLP libraries available for Python--their use cases, their strengths, their weaknesses, and their general level of popularity.

Despite its notable success in adversarial learning approaches to multi-domain task-oriented dialog system, training the dialog policy via adversarial inverse reinforcement learning often fails to balance the performance of the policy generator and reward estimator. During optimization, the reward estimator often overwhelms the policy generator and produces excessively uninformative gradients. We proposes the Variational Reward estimator Bottleneck (VRB), which is an effective regularization method that aims to constrain unproductive information flows between inputs and the reward estimator. The VRB focuses on capturing discriminative features, by exploiting information bottleneck on mutual information. Empirical results on a multi-domain task-oriented dialog dataset demonstrate that the VRB significantly outperforms previous methods.

Dialogue systems dealing with multi-domain tasks are highly required. How to record the state remains a key problem in a task-oriented dialogue system. Normally we use human-defined features as dialogue states and apply a state tracker to extract these features. However, the performance of such a system is limited by the error propagation of a state tracker. In this paper, we propose a dialogue generation model that needs no external state trackers and still benefits from human-labeled semantic data. By using a teacher-student framework, several teacher models are firstly trained in their individual domains, learn dialogue policies from labeled states. And then the learned knowledge and experience are merged and transferred to a universal student model, which takes raw utterance as its input. Experiments show that the dialogue system trained under our framework outperforms the one uses a belief tracker.

It is essential for dialogue-based spatial reasoning systems to maintain memory of historical states of the world. In addition to conveying that the dialogue agent is mentally present and engaged with the task, referring to historical states may be crucial for enabling collaborative planning (e.g., for planning to return to a previous state, or diagnosing a past misstep). In this paper, we approach the problem of spatial memory in a multi-modal spoken dialogue system capable of answering questions about interaction history in a physical blocks world setting. This work builds upon a full spatial question-answering pipeline consisting of a vision system, speech input and output mediated by an animated avatar, a dialogue system that robustly interprets spatial queries, and a constraint solver that derives answers based on 3-D spatial modelling. The contributions of this work include a symbolic dialogue context registering knowledge about discourse history and changes in the world, as well as a natural language understanding module capable of interpreting free-form historical questions and querying the dialogue context to form an answer.

How to build a high-quality multi-domain dialogue system is a challenging work due to its complicated and entangled dialogue state space among each domain, which seriously limits the quality of dialogue policy, and further affects the generated response. In this paper, we propose a novel method to acquire a satisfying policy and subtly circumvent the knotty dialogue state representation problem in the multi-domain setting. Inspired by real school teaching scenarios, our method is composed of multiple domain-specific teachers and a universal student. Each individual teacher only focuses on one specific domain and learns its corresponding domain knowledge and dialogue policy based on a precisely extracted single domain dialogue state representation. Then, these domain-specific teachers impart their domain knowledge and policies to a universal student model and collectively make this student model a multi-domain dialogue expert. Experiment results show that our method reaches competitive results with SOTAs in both multi-domain and single domain setting.

In this tutorial I will guide you on how to detect emotions associated with textual data which can be either classified as either positive or negative and how can you apply that knowledge in variety of applications depending on what you wanna do. In this tutorial I will guide you on how to detect emotions associated with textual data which can be either classified as either positive or negative and how can you apply that knowledge in variety of applications depending on what you wanna do. For instance you want to perform automatic analysis of customer feedback with directly reading them as either positive or negative feedback you will need to Sentiment analyzer to check the negativity or positivity of the textual data.

Spoken dialog systems have seen applications in many domains, including medical for automatic conversational diagnosis. State-of-the-art dialog managers are usually driven by deep reinforcement learning models, such as deep Q networks (DQNs), which learn by interacting with a simulator to explore the entire action space since real conversations are limited. However, the DQN-based automatic diagnosis models do not achieve satisfying performances when adapted to new, unseen diseases with only a few training samples. In this work, we propose the Prototypical Q Networks (ProtoQN) as the dialog manager for the automatic diagnosis systems. The model calculates prototype embeddings with real conversations between doctors and patients, learning from them and simulator-augmented dialogs more efficiently. We create both supervised and few-shot learning tasks with the Muzhi corpus. Experiments showed that the ProtoQN significantly outperformed the baseline DQN model in both supervised and few-shot learning scenarios, and achieves state-of-the-art few-shot learning performances.

Many machine learning models have to incorporate latent variables to learn target concepts on training data. The variables are understood only statistically and optimize a statistical property such as likelihood, but usually they are not understood in human understandable semantical terms. An example for such a situation is that of topics in the generative Bayesian model called latent Dirichlet allocation, modelling topics as word distributions from the vocabulary of documents. This paper proposes a framework of classifications and theory interpretations to be used as a construction and analysis tool for exactly such situations. As a proof of concept an algorithm is considered that uses latent Dirichlet allocation topics induced by a corpus to enrich the given sets of RDF annotations on each text of the corpus. The general framework of classifications is used to discuss the role of the algorithm in finding representations of topics by RDF triples.

Understanding emotions and responding accordingly is one of the biggest challenges of dialog systems. In this paper, we present EmpTransfo, a multi-head Transformer architecture for creating an empathetic dialog system. We show that utilizing the history of emotions and other metadata can improve the quality of generated conversations by the dialog system. EmpTransfo utilizes state-of-the-art pre-trained models (e.g., OpenAI-GPT) for language generation, though models with different sizes can be used. Our experimental results using a challenging language corpus show that the proposed approach outperforms other models in terms of Hit@1 and PPL.

In this study, we present an approach and a dataset for aspect-based sentiment analysis, showing how we extract and classify aspect phrases. The research field of aspect-based sentiment analysis aims at finding opinions expressed for individual characteristics of products or services in natural language texts. In the literature, reviews for common products or services such as smartphones or restaurants were mostly investigated. We describe our newly annotated dataset of German physician reviews, which presents a sensitive and linguistically complex domain, taking care to describe the annotation process and the functionality of our neural network approach. Finally, we introduce a model that can extract and classify aspect phrases in one step while obtaining an F1 score of 80%. As we employ our algorithm in a more complex domain, we believe that our study outperforms other studies.