A major bottleneck in training end-to-end task-oriented dialog system is the lack of data. To utilize limited training data more efficiently, we propose Modular Supervision Network (MOSS), an encoder-decoder training framework that could incorporate supervision from various intermediate dialog system modules including natural language understanding, dialog state tracking, dialog policy learning, and natural language generation. With only 60% of the training data, MOSS-all (i.e., MOSS with supervision from all four dialog modules) outperforms state-of-the-art models on CamRest676. Moreover, introducing modular supervision has even bigger benefits when the dialog task has a more complex dialog state and action space. With only 40% of the training data, MOSS-all outperforms the state-of-the-art model on a complex laptop network troubleshooting dataset, LaptopNetwork, that we introduced. LaptopNetwork consists of conversations between real customers and customer service agents in Chinese. Moreover, MOSS framework can accommodate dialogs that have supervision from different dialog modules at both the framework level and model level. Therefore, MOSS is extremely flexible to update in a real-world deployment.

It consists of 30k turns plus 10k annotated SQL queries, obtained from a Wizard-of-Oz (WOZ) collection of 3k dialogues querying 200 complex DBs spanning 138 domains. Each dialogue simulates a real-world DB query scenario with a crowd worker as a user exploring the DB and a SQL expert retrieving answers with SQL, clarifying ambiguous questions, or otherwise informing of unanswerable questions. When user questions are answerable by SQL, the expert describes the SQL and execution results to the user, hence maintaining a natural interaction flow. CoSQL introduces new challenges compared to existing task-oriented dialogue datasets: (1) the dialogue states are grounded in SQL, a domain-independent executable representation, instead of domain-specific slot-value pairs, and (2) because testing is done on unseen databases, success requires generalizing to new domains. CoSQL includes three tasks: SQL-grounded dialogue state tracking, response generation from query results, and user dialogue act prediction. We evaluate a set of strong baselines for each task and show that CoSQL presents significant challenges for future research. The dataset, baselines, and leaderboard will be released at https:// yale-lily.github.io/cosql .

In this talk I will show data engineers and architects how to run real-time TensorFlow Inception Image Recognition on images captured by remote sensors and images in tweets. In the same flow I will also demonstrate how to apply real-time sentiment analysis and intelligent routing of data to Phoenix, Email and Slack. I will elaborate on a number of different sentiment analysis frameworks available for use within Apache NiFi including Python NLTK, Stanford CoreNLP, Python SpaCy and Python TextBlob. This talk will be a deep dive into how to manage complex dataflow pipelines ingesting from multiple streaming sources including social, public open data feeds, logs, drones, RDBMS and IoT with transformations, deep learning, machine learning and business rules. Data engineers will be shown the power of Apache NiFi for loading diverse sources of data, applying transformations in-stream, routing based on attributes, adding sentiment data to workflows, running deep learning algorithms in stream and storing data into Apache Phoenix on HBase.

The task of predicting fine grained user opinion based on spontaneous spoken language is a key problem arising in the development of Computational Agents as well as in the development of social network based opinion miners. Unfortunately, gathering reliable data on which a model can be trained is notoriously difficult and existing works rely only on coarsely labeled opinions. In this work we aim at bridging the gap separating fine grained opinion models already developed for written language and coarse grained models developed for spontaneous multimodal opinion mining. We take advantage of the implicit hierarchical structure of opinions to build a joint fine and coarse grained opinion model that exploits different views of the opinion expression. The resulting model shares some properties with attention-based models and is shown to provide competitive results on a recently released multimodal fine grained annotated corpus.

In natural language understanding components, detecting out-of-domain (OOD) inputs is important for dialogue systems since wrongly accepting these OOD utterances that are not currently supported may lead to catastrophic failures of the entire system. Entropy regularization is an effective solution to avoid such failures, however, its computation heavily depends on OOD data, which are expensive to collect. In this paper, we propose a novel text generation model to produce high-quality OOD samples and thereby improve the performance of OOD detection. The proposed model can also utilize a set of unlabeled data to improve the effectiveness of these generated OOD samples. Experiments show that our method can effectively improve the OOD detection performance of a NLU module. 1 Introduction Natural Language Understanding (NLU) in dialog systems, particularly including task-oriented dialog systems and intelligent personal assistants, is vital for understanding users' inputs and making effective interactions. NLU maps text inputs to structured user intents, and decides the downstream processing pipelines of a dialog system, thereby becoming a precursor for the success of such systems. Recently, various deep neural network (DNN) based NLU models have been proposed and applied in real-world applications (Kim et al., 2018; Sarikaya, 2017; Y oo et al., 2018). Most existing DNN based NLU modules are built by following a closed-world assumption (Fei and Liu, 2016), i.e, the data used in the training and test phrase are drawn from the same distribution. However, such an assumption is commonly violated in practical systems that are deployed in a dynamic or open environment. Specifically, practical NLU systems often encounter o ut-o f-d omain (OOD) inputs that are not supported by the system and thus not observed in the training data.

This year's annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2019) was bigger than ever. Although the conference received 75% more submissions than last year, the quality of the research papers remained high, and so the acceptance rates are almost the same. It is becoming more and more challenging to keep track of the latest research advances in your area with such an overwhelming number of good research papers coming out. So, for your convenience, we've picked up and summarized several interesting research papers that might have particularly useful applications in a business setting. These are also the papers that got lots of attention from the AI community, and most of these studies have been nominated for or awarded ACL Best Paper Awards.

To build an effective product that relies on machine learning, you need a large volume of high-quality training data. For the solution to correctly understand and mimic humans, it's crucial to have a strategy around collecting and annotating training data that optimizes for quality. Join us to learn about the data you need to build solutions like natural language processing, chatbots, and sentiment analysis, with live Q&A to follow.

Your smart contact center can see how many calls changed from neutral to angry. How many calls changed from angry to happy/neutral. And how many calls changed from neutral to happy. This gives you a new metric to judge agent performance and skill. Recordings where customers are converted from angry to happy can picked out in seconds and used to train agents.

"Learning to choose is hard. Learning to choose well is harder. And learning to choose well in a world of unlimited possibilities is harder still, perhaps too hard." When starting a new NLP sentiment analysis project, it can be quite an overwhelming task to narrow down on a select methodology for a given application. Do we use a rule-based model, or do we train a model on our own data? Should we train a neural network, or will a simple linear model meet our requirements?

This framework has been shown to substantially reduce data needs by leveraging domain-independent dimensions, such as social obligations or feedback, which (as we show) can be transferred between domains. In this paper, we conduct a user study and show that the performance of a multidimensional system, which can be adapted from a source domain, is equivalent to that of a one-dimensional baseline, which can only be trained from scratch. 1 Introduction Data-driven approaches to spoken dialogue systems (SDS) are limited by their reliance on substantial amounts of annotated data in the target domain. This can be addressed by considering transfer learning techniques, e.g.