Language systems have been of great interest to the research community and have recently reached the mass market through various assistant platforms on the web. Reinforcement Learning methods that optimize dialogue policies have seen successes in past years and have recently been extended into methods that personalize the dialogue, e.g. take the personal context of users into account. These works, however, are limited to personalization to a single user with whom they require multiple interactions and do not generalize the usage of context across users. This work introduces a problem where a generalized usage of context is relevant and proposes two Reinforcement Learning (RL)-based approaches to this problem. The first approach uses a single learner and extends the traditional POMDP formulation of dialogue state with features that describe the user context. The second approach segments users by context and then employs a learner per context. We compare these approaches in a benchmark of existing non-RL and RL-based methods in three established and one novel application domain of financial product recommendation. We compare the influence of context and training experiences on performance and find that learning approaches generally outperform a handcrafted gold standard.

Dialogue systems are increasingly using knowledge bases (KBs) storing real-world facts to help generate quality responses. However, as the KBs are inherently incomplete and remain fixed during conversation, it limits dialogue systems' ability to answer questions and to handle questions involving entities or relations that are not in the KB. In this paper, we make an attempt to propose an engine for Continuous and Interactive Learning of Knowledge (CILK) for dialogue systems to give them the ability to continuously and interactively learn and infer new knowledge during conversations. With more knowledge accumulated over time, they will be able to learn better and answer more questions. Our empirical evaluation shows that CILK is promising.

Learning representations which remain invariant to a nuisance factor has a great interest in Domain Adaptation, Transfer Learning, and Fair Machine Learning. Finding such representations becomes highly challenging in NLP tasks since the nuisance factor is entangled in a raw text. To our knowledge, a major issue is also that only few NLP datasets allow assessing the impact of such factor. In this paper, we introduce two generalization metrics to assess model robustness to a nuisance factor: \textit{generalization under target bias} and \textit{generalization onto unknown}. We combine those metrics with a simple data filtering approach to control the impact of the nuisance factor on the data and thus to build experimental biased datasets. We apply our method to standard datasets of the literature (\textit{Amazon} and \textit{Yelp}). Our work shows that a simple text classification baseline (i.e., sentiment analysis on reviews) may be badly affected by the \textit{product ID} (considered as a nuisance factor) when learning the polarity of a review. The method proposed is generic and applicable as soon as the nuisance variable is annotated in the dataset.

Episode 167 – Kevin Craine and Billee Howard discuss the use of nuero-powered technology to quantify, measure and understand human thought. Explore using artificial intelligence and sentiment analysis to connect customer emotion directly to 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.

Due to the increased availability of online reviews, sentiment analysis had been witnessed a booming interest from the researchers. Sentiment analysis is a computational treatment of sentiment used to extract and understand the opinions of authors. While many systems were built to predict the sentiment of a document or a sentence, many others provide the necessary detail on various aspects of the entity (i.e. aspect-based sentiment analysis). Most of the available data resources were tailored to English and the other popular European languages. Although Persian is a language with more than 110 million speakers, to the best of our knowledge, there is not any public dataset on aspect-based sentiment analysis in Persian. This paper provides a manually annotated Persian dataset, Pars-ABSA, which is verified by 3 native Persian speakers. The dataset consists of 5114 positive, 3061 negative and 1827 neutral data samples from 5602 unique reviews. Moreover, as a baseline, this paper reports the performance of some state-of-the-art aspect-based sentiment analysis methods with a focus on deep learning, on Pars-ABSA. The obtained results are impressive compared to similar English state-of-the-art.

What are the products with the highest ratings? Or in SQL What are the products with the highest ratings?

Neural dialog models have exhibited strong performance, however their end-to-end nature lacks a representation of the explicit structure of dialog. This results in a loss of generalizability, controllability and a data-hungry nature. Conversely, more traditional dialog systems do have strong models of explicit structure. This paper introduces several approaches for explicitly incorporating structure into neural models of dialog. Structured Fusion Networks first learn neural dialog modules corresponding to the structured components of traditional dialog systems and then incorporate these modules in a higher-level generative model. Structured Fusion Networks obtain strong results on the MultiWOZ dataset, both with and without reinforcement learning. Structured Fusion Networks are shown to have several valuable properties, including better domain generalizability, improved performance in reduced data scenarios and robustness to divergence during reinforcement learning.

Natural Language Inference (NLI), also known as Recognizing Textual Entailment (RTE), is one of the most important problems in natural language processing. It requires to infer the logical relationship between two given sentences. While current approaches mostly focus on the interaction architectures of the sentences, in this paper, we propose to transfer knowledge from some important discourse markers to augment the quality of the NLI model. We observe that people usually use some discourse markers such as "so" or "but" to represent the logical relationship between two sentences. These words potentially have deep connections with the meanings of the sentences, thus can be utilized to help improve the representations of them. Moreover, we use reinforcement learning to optimize a new objective function with a reward defined by the property of the NLI datasets to make full use of the labels information. Experiments show that our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance on several large-scale datasets.

Neural end-to-end goal-oriented dialog systems showed promise to reduce the workload of human agents for customer service, as well as reduce wait time for users. However, their inability to handle new user behavior at deployment has limited their usage in real world. In this work, we propose an end-to-end trainable method for neural goal-oriented dialog systems which handles new user behaviors at deployment by transferring the dialog to a human agent intelligently. The proposed method has three goals: 1) maximize user's task success by transferring to human agents, 2) minimize the load on the human agents by transferring to them only when it is essential and 3) learn online from the human agent's responses to reduce human agents load further. We evaluate our proposed method on a modified-bAbI dialog task that simulates the scenario of new user behaviors occurring at test time. Experimental results show that our proposed method is effective in achieving the desired goals.

This paper learns multi-modal embeddings from text, audio, and video views/modes of data in order to improve upon down-stream sentiment classification. The experimental framework also allows investigation of the relative contributions of the individual views in the final multi-modal embedding. Individual features derived from the three views are combined into a multi-modal embedding using Deep Canonical Correlation Analysis (DCCA) in two ways i) One-Step DCCA and ii) Two-Step DCCA. This paper learns text embeddings using BERT, the current state-of-the-art in text encoders. We posit that this highly optimized algorithm dominates over the contribution of other views, though each view does contribute to the final result. Classification tasks are carried out on two benchmark datasets and on a new Debate Emotion data set, and together these demonstrate that the one-Step DCCA outperforms the current state-of-the-art in learning multi-modal embeddings.