Episode 167 - Kevin Craine and Billee Howard discuss the use of nuero-powered technology to quantify, measure and understand human thought. Explore how to use artificial intelligence and sentiment analysis to connect customer emotion directly to improved business performance. Understand the convergence of'big emotion' and'big data' and how it is valuable from a strategic and marketing perspective. Stay tuned for three action items in the second half. Do you want to be a guest?

Every natural text is written in some style. The style is formed by a complex combination of different stylistic factors, including formality markers, emotions, metaphors, etc. Some factors implicitly reflect the author's personality, while others are explicitly controlled by the author's choices in order to achieve some personal or social goal. One cannot form a complete understanding of a text and its author without considering these factors. The factors combine and co-vary in complex ways to form styles. Studying the nature of the covarying combinations sheds light on stylistic language in general, sometimes called cross-style language understanding. This paper provides a benchmark corpus (xSLUE) with an online platform (http://xslue.com) for cross-style language understanding and evaluation. The benchmark contains text in 15 different styles and 23 classification tasks. For each task, we provide the fine-tuned classifier for further analysis. Our analysis shows that some styles are highly dependent on each other (e.g., impoliteness and offense), and some domains (e.g., tweets, political debates) are stylistically more diverse than others (e.g., academic manuscripts). We discuss the technical challenges of cross-style understanding and potential directions for future research: cross-style modeling which shares the internal representation for low-resource or low-performance styles and other applications such as cross-style generation.

Training dialog policies for speech-based virtual assistants requires a plethora of conversational data. The data collection phase is often expensive and time consuming due to human involvement. To address this issue, a common solution is to build user simulators for data generation. For the successful deployment of the trained policies into real world domains, it is vital that the user simulator mimics realistic conditions. In particular, speech-based assistants are heavily affected by automatic speech recognition and language understanding errors, hence the user simulator should be able to simulate similar errors. In this paper, we review the existing error simulation methods that induce errors at audio, phoneme, text, or semantic level; and conduct detailed comparisons between the audio-level and text-level methods. In the process, we improve the existing text-level method by introducing confidence score prediction and out-of-vocabulary word mapping. We also explore the impact of audio-level and text-level methods on learning a simple clarification dialog policy to recover from errors to provide insight on future improvement for both approaches.

The goal is to be able to make SENTIMENT ANALYSIS prediction/detection of what the user is writing in a very UI interactive app (BLAZOR based) in the client side and running an ML.NET model (Sentiment analysis based on binary-classification) in the server side. From ML.NET perspective, the goal is to optimize the ML.NET model executions in the server by sharing the ML.NET objects used for predictions across Http requests and being able to implement very simple code to be used by the user when predicting, like the following line of code that you could write on any ASP.NET Core controller's method or custom service class: The object predictionEnginePool will be injected in the controller's constructor or into you custom class. Internally, it is optimized so the object dependencies are cached and shared across Http requests with minimum overhead when creating those objects. Blazor allows you to run C# code in the client side, as shown in the architecture figure. For this sample we chose to run the ML.NET model in the server side, so the model is protected within the service.

Multi-domain dialogue state tracking (DST) is a critical component for conversational AI systems. The domain ontology (i.e., specification of domains, slots, and values) of a conversational AI system is generally incomplete, making the capability for DST models to generalize to new slots, values, and domains during inference imperative. In this paper, we propose to model multi-domain DST as a question answering problem, referred to as Dialogue State Tracking via Question Answering (DSTQA). Within DSTQA, each turn generates a question asking for the value of a (domain, slot) pair, thus making it naturally extensible to unseen domains, slots, and values. Additionally, we use a dynamically-evolving knowledge graph to explicitly learn relationships between (domain, slot) pairs. Our model has a 5.80% and 12.21% relative improvement over the current state-of-the-art model on MultiWOZ 2.0 and MultiWOZ 2.1 datasets, respectively. Additionally, our model consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art model in domain adaptation settings.

The blocks world is a classic toy domain that has long been used to build and test spatial reasoning systems. Despite its relative simplicity, tackling this domain in its full complexity requires the agent to exhibit a rich set of functional capabilities, ranging from vision to natural language understanding. There is currently a resurgence of interest in solving problems in such limited domains using modern techniques. In this work we tackle spatial question answering in a holistic way, using 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 modeling. The contributions of this work include a semantic parser that maps spatial questions into logical forms consistent with a general approach to meaning representation, a dialog manager based on a schema representation, and a constraint solver for spatial questions that provides answers in agreement with human perception. These and other components are integrated into a multi-modal human-computer interaction pipeline.

Human communication often involves the use of verbal irony or sarcasm, where the speakers usually mean the opposite of what they say. To better understand how verbal irony is expressed by the speaker and interpreted by the hearer we conduct a crowdsourcing task: given an utterance expressing verbal irony, users are asked to verbalize their interpretation of the speaker's ironic message. We propose a typology of linguistic strategies for verbal irony interpretation and link it to various theoretical linguistic frameworks. We design computational models to capture these strategies and present empirical studies aimed to answer three questions: (1) what is the distribution of linguistic strategies used by hearers to interpret ironic messages?; (2) do hearers adopt similar strategies for interpreting the speaker's ironic intent?; and (3) does the type of semantic incongruity in the ironic message (explicit vs. implicit) influence the choice of interpretation strategies by the hearers?

The General Language Understanding Evaluation (GLUE) benchmark is widely used to evaluate Natural Language Processing (NLP) models. Although GLUE includes a range of English sentence-pairing, word prediction and other NLP tasks, it cannot evaluate the performance of Chinese NLP models. Now, a group of NLP researchers and enthusiasts, including graduates from Tsinghua University, Peking University, and Zhejiang University, have introduced ChineseGLUE, a benchmark designed to encourage the development and assessment of Chinese language models. GLUE was introduced in 2018 by researchers from New York University, University of Washington and DeepMind. Since then, new pretrained language models such as Google's BERT have rapidly improved performance in Natural Language Understanding (NLU), a NLP research area with a focus on machine reading comprehension through sentiment analysis and grammatical judgment, etc.

Rising demand for artificial intelligence-powered chatbots with sentiment analysis -- a fancy word for emotion -- is creating new growth opportunities for businesses in the area, China Daily reports. "An increasing number of businesses are asking for chatbots with more functions than just being conversation assistants. They want chatbots that have a better sense of empathy, are more interactive, and are able to transform consumer emotions into data and conduct sentiment analysis," said Xu Yiya, vice-president of Xiao-i Robot Technology Co. Ltd., an AI customer service provider. Xu said sentiment analysis can help chatbots better understand consumer needs. Increasing demand for AI-powered chatbots with sentiment analysis is creating new business opportunities in the booming AI sentiment analysis market, which is estimated to see a 21% annual increase from 2019 to 2025, according to market analysis company QYReports, as business owners are worrying that customers may not be satisfied talking to emotionless chatbots.

Task-oriented dialog presents a difficult challenge encompassing multiple problems including multi-turn language understanding and generation, knowledge retrieval and reasoning, and action prediction. Modern dialog systems typically begin by converting conversation history to a symbolic object referred to as belief state by using supervised learning. The belief state is then used to reason on an external knowledge source whose result along with the conversation history is used in action prediction and response generation tasks independently. Such a pipeline of individually optimized components not only makes the development process cumbersome but also makes it non-trivial to leverage session-level user reinforcement signals. In this paper, we develop Neural Assistant: a single neural network model that takes conversation history and an external knowledge source as input and jointly produces both text response and action to be taken by the system as output. The model learns to reason on the provided knowledge source with weak supervision signal coming from the text generation and the action prediction tasks, hence removing the need for belief state annotations. In the MultiWOZ dataset, we study the effect of distant supervision, and the size of knowledge base on model performance. We find that the Neural Assistant without belief states is able to incorporate external knowledge information achieving higher factual accuracy scores compared to Transformer. In settings comparable to reported baseline systems, Neural Assistant when provided with oracle belief state significantly improves language generation performance.