Just in case you have not listened to the telephone calls placed by Google's latest conversational application code-named "Duplex" you should. Google Duplex can place calls and make restaurant reservations or book appointments to hair salons. Speech recognition and spoken dialogue technology has had the capability of successfully completing such tasks for over a decade now. What is exciting and frankly also a bit scary is that for the few (probably cherry-picked) recordings made available at the Google AI blog, the robotic caller is practically indistinguishable from a human. Google Duplex is not the first conversational system that passes the Turing test with flying colors for a few minutes: chatbots have been competing in this arena for years now.

One of the main challenges online social systems face is the prevalence of antisocial behavior, such as harassment and personal attacks. In this work, we introduce the task of predicting from the very start of a conversation whether it will get out of hand. As opposed to detecting undesirable behavior after the fact, this task aims to enable early, actionable prediction at a time when the conversation might still be salvaged. To this end, we develop a framework for capturing pragmatic devices---such as politeness strategies and rhetorical prompts---used to start a conversation, and analyze their relation to its future trajectory. Applying this framework in a controlled setting, we demonstrate the feasibility of detecting early warning signs of antisocial behavior in online discussions.

This paper introduces zero-shot dialog generation (ZSDG), as a step towards neural dialog systems that can instantly generalize to new situations with minimal data. ZSDG enables an end-to-end generative dialog system to generalize to a new domain for which only a domain description is provided and no training dialogs are available. Then a novel learning framework, Action Matching, is proposed. This algorithm can learn a cross-domain embedding space that models the semantics of dialog responses which, in turn, lets a neural dialog generation model generalize to new domains. We evaluate our methods on a new synthetic dialog dataset, and an existing human-human dialog dataset. Results show that our method has superior performance in learning dialog models that rapidly adapt their behavior to new domains and suggests promising future research.

Generating emotional language is a key step towards building empathetic natural language processing agents. However, a major challenge for this line of research is the lack of large-scale labeled training data, and previous studies are limited to only small sets of human annotated sentiment labels. Additionally, explicitly controlling the emotion and sentiment of generated text is also difficult. In this paper, we take a more radical approach: we exploit the idea of leveraging Twitter data that are naturally labeled with emojis. More specifically, we collect a large corpus of Twitter conversations that include emojis in the response, and assume the emojis convey the underlying emotions of the sentence. We then introduce a reinforced conditional variational encoder approach to train a deep generative model on these conversations, which allows us to use emojis to control the emotion of the generated text. Experimentally, we show in our quantitative and qualitative analyses that the proposed models can successfully generate high-quality abstractive conversation responses in accordance with designated emotions.

Update 23 Aug 2017: Do note that Quantopian platform will no longer support third party broker integration. Please see their website under forum. The title of the post is "Phasing Out Brokerage Integrations". This course provides you with the tools that top hedge funds used. These institutional tools include but are not limited to market data, fundamental data, sentiment analysis data, and more.

Use the latest data mining best practices to enable timely, actionable, evidence-based decision making throughout your organization! Real-World Data Mining demystifies current best practices, showing how to use data mining to uncover hidden patterns and correlations, and leverage these to improve all aspects of business performance. Drawing on extensive experience as a researcher, practitioner, and instructor, Dr. Dursun Delen delivers an optimal balance of concepts, techniques and applications. Without compromising either simplicity or clarity, he provides enough technical depth to help readers truly understand how data mining technologies work. Coverage includes: processes, methods, techniques, tools, and metrics; the role and management of data; text and web mining; sentiment analysis; and Big Data integration.

ABSTRACT This work focuses on the use of acoustic cues for modeling turn-taking in dyadic spoken dialogues. Previous work has shown that speaker intentions (e.g., asking a question, uttering a backchannel, etc.) can influence turn-taking behavior and are good predictors of turn-transitions in spoken dialogues. However, speaker intentions are not readily available for use by automated systems at run-time; making it difficult to use this information to anticipate a turn-transition. To this end, we propose a multi-task neural approach for predicting turntransitions and speaker intentions simultaneously. Our results show that adding the auxiliary task of speaker intention prediction improves the performance of turn-transition prediction in spoken dialogues, without relying on additional input features during run-time.

Word embeddings have been widely used in sentiment classification because of their efficacy for semantic representations of words. Given reviews from different domains, some existing methods for word embeddings exploit sentiment information, but they cannot produce domain-sensitive embeddings. On the other hand, some other existing methods can generate domain-sensitive word embeddings, but they cannot distinguish words with similar contexts but opposite sentiment polarity. We propose a new method for learning domain-sensitive and sentiment-aware embeddings that simultaneously capture the information of sentiment semantics and domain sensitivity of individual words. Our method can automatically determine and produce domain-common embeddings and domain-specific embeddings. The differentiation of domain-common and domain-specific words enables the advantage of data augmentation of common semantics from multiple domains and capture the varied semantics of specific words from different domains at the same time. Experimental results show that our model provides an effective way to learn domain-sensitive and sentiment-aware word embeddings which benefit sentiment classification at both sentence level and lexicon term level.

Sentence vectors represent an appealing approach to meaning: learn an embedding that encompasses the meaning of a sentence in a single vector, that can be used for a variety of semantic tasks. Existing models for learning sentence embeddings either require extensive computational resources to train on large corpora, or are trained on costly, manually curated datasets of sentence relations. We observe that humans naturally annotate the relations between their sentences with discourse markers like "but" and "because". These words are deeply linked to the meanings of the sentences they connect. Using this natural signal, we automatically collect a classification dataset from unannotated text. We evaluate our sentence embeddings on a variety of transfer tasks, including discourse-related tasks using Penn Discourse Treebank. We demonstrate that training a model to predict discourse markers yields high quality sentence embeddings.

Dynamic topic modeling facilitates the identification of topical trends over time in temporal collections of unstructured documents. We introduce a novel unsupervised neural dynamic topic model named as Recurrent Neural Network-Replicated Softmax Model (RNNRSM), where the discovered topics at each time influence the topic discovery in the subsequent time steps. We account for the temporal ordering of documents by explicitly modeling a joint distribution of latent topical dependencies over time, using distributional estimators with temporal recurrent connections. Applying RNN-RSM to 19 years of articles on NLP research, we demonstrate that compared to state-of-the art topic models, RNNRSM shows better generalization, topic interpretation, evolution and trends. We also introduce a metric (named as SPAN) to quantify the capability of dynamic topic model to capture word evolution in topics over time.