We present ConvLab, an open-source multi-domain end-to-end dialog system platform, that enables researchers to quickly set up experiments with reusable components and compare a large set of different approaches, ranging from conventional pipeline systems to end-to-end neural models, in common environments. ConvLab offers a set of fully annotated datasets and associated pre-trained reference models. As a showcase, we extend the MultiWOZ dataset with user dialog act annotations to train all component models and demonstrate how ConvLab makes it easy and effortless to conduct complicated experiments in multi-domain end-to-end dialog settings.

Learning a shared dialog structure from a set of task-oriented dialogs is an important challenge in computational linguistics. The learned dialog structure can shed light on how to analyze human dialogs, and more importantly contribute to the design and evaluation of dialog systems. We propose to extract dialog structures using a modified VRNN model with discrete latent vectors. Different from existing HMM-based models, our model is based on variational-autoencoder (VAE). Such model is able to capture more dynamics in dialogs beyond the surface forms of the language. We find that qualitatively, our method extracts meaningful dialog structure, and quantitatively, outperforms previous models on the ability to predict unseen data. We further evaluate the model's effectiveness in a downstream task, the dialog system building task. Experiments show that, by integrating the learned dialog structure into the reward function design, the model converges faster and to a better outcome in a reinforcement learning setting.

Success of deep learning techniques have renewed the interest in development of dialogue systems. However, current systems struggle to have consistent long term conversations with the users and fail to build rapport. Topic spotting, the task of automatically inferring the topic of a conversation, has been shown to be helpful in making a dialog system more engaging and efficient. We propose a hierarchical model with self attention for topic spotting. Experiments on the Switchboard corpus show the superior performance of our model over previously proposed techniques for topic spotting and deep models for text classification. Additionally, in contrast to offline processing of dialog, we also analyze the performance of our model in a more realistic setting i.e. in an online setting where the topic is identified in real time as the dialog progresses. Results show that our model is able to generalize even with limited information in the online setting.

Our study employs sentiment analysis to evaluate the compatibility of Amazon.com reviews with their corresponding ratings. Sentiment analysis is the task of identifying and classifying the sentiment expressed in a piece of text as being positive or negative. On e-commerce websites such as Amazon.com, consumers can submit their reviews along with a specific polarity rating. In some instances, there is a mismatch between the review and the rating. To identify the reviews with mismatched ratings we performed sentiment analysis using deep learning on Amazon.com product review data. Product reviews were converted to vectors using paragraph vector, which then was used to train a recurrent neural network with gated recurrent unit. Our model incorporated both semantic relationship of review text and product information. We also developed a web service application that predicts the rating score for a submitted review using the trained model and if there is a mismatch between predicted rating score and submitted rating score, it provides feedback to the reviewer.

We propose a new topic modeling procedure that takes advantage of the fact that the There are many extensions of LDA, including a nonparametric Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) log likelihood extension based on the Dirichlet process function is asymptotically equivalent called Hierarchical Dirichlet Process (Teh et al., to the logarithm of the volume of the topic 2005), a correlated topic extension based on the logistic simplex. This allows topic modeling to be normal prior on the topic proportions (Lafferty reformulated as finding the probability simplex and Blei, 2006), and a time-varying topic modeling that minimizes its volume and encloses extension (Blei and Lafferty, 2006). There are the documents that are represented as distributions two main approaches for estimation of the parameters over words. A convex relaxation of probabilistic topic models: the variational of the minimum volume topic model optimization approximation popularized by Blei et al. (2003) and is proposed, and it is shown that the sampling based approach studied by Pritchard the relaxed problem has the same global et al. (2000).

Stochastic blockmodels allow us to represent networks in terms of a latent community structure, often yielding intuitions about the underlying social structure. Typically, this structure is inferred based only on a binary network representing the presence or absence of interactions between nodes, which limits the amount of information that can be extracted from the data. In practice, many interaction networks contain much more information about the relationship between two nodes. For example, in an email network, the volume of communication between two users and the content of that communication can give us information about both the strength and the nature of their relationship. In this paper, we propose the Topic Blockmodel, a stochastic blockmodel that uses a count-based topic model to capture the interaction modalities within and between latent communities. By explicitly incorporating information sent between nodes in our network representation, we are able to address questions of interest in real-world situations, such as predicting recipients for an email message or inferring the content of an unopened email. Further, by considering topics associated with a pair of communities, we are better able to interpret the nature of each community and the manner in which it interacts with other communities.

Sentiment analysis consists of evaluating opinions or statements from the analysis of text. Among the methods used to estimate the degree in which a text expresses a given sentiment, are those based on Gaussian Processes. However, traditional Gaussian Processes methods use a predefined kernel with hyperparameters that can be tuned but whose structure can not be adapted. In this paper, we propose the application of Genetic Programming for evolving Gaussian Process kernels that are more precise for sentiment analysis. We use use a very flexible representation of kernels combined with a multi-objective approach that simultaneously considers two quality metrics and the computational time spent by the kernels. Our results show that the algorithm can outperform Gaussian Processes with traditional kernels for some of the sentiment analysis tasks considered.

Cross-domain sentiment classification (CDSC) is an importance task in domain adaptation and sentiment classification. Due to the domain discrepancy, a sentiment classifier trained on source domain data may not works well on target domain data. In recent years, many researchers have used deep neural network models for cross-domain sentiment classification task, many of which use Gradient Reversal Layer (GRL) to design an adversarial network structure to train a domain-shared sentiment classifier. Different from those methods, we proposed Hierarchical Attention Generative Adversarial Networks (HAGAN) which alternately trains a generator and a discriminator in order to produce a document representation which is sentiment-distinguishable but domain-indistinguishable. Besides, the HAGAN model applies Bidirectional Gated Recurrent Unit (Bi-GRU) to encode the contextual information of a word and a sentence into the document representation. In addition, the HAGAN model use hierarchical attention mechanism to optimize the document representation and automatically capture the pivots and non-pivots. The experiments on Amazon review dataset show the effectiveness of HAGAN.

Dialogue systems have become recently essential in our life. Their use is getting more and more fluid and easy throughout the time. This boils down to the improvements made in NLP and AI fields. In this paper, we try to provide an overview to the current state of the art of dialogue systems, their categories and the different approaches to build them. We end up with a discussion that compares all the techniques and analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of each. Finally, we present an opinion piece suggesting to orientate the research towards the standardization of dialogue systems building.

Most research on intelligent agents centers on the agent and not on the user. We look at the origins of agent-centric research for slot-filling, gaming and chatbot agents. We then argue that it is important to concentrate more on the user. After reviewing relevant literature, some approaches for creating and assessing user-centric systems are proposed.