During the past decade, several areas of speech and language understanding have witnessed substantial breakthroughs from the use of data-driven models. In the area of dialogue systems, the trend is less obvious, and most practical systems are still built through significant engineering and expert knowledge. Nevertheless, several recent results suggest that data-driven approaches are feasible and quite promising. To facilitate research in this area, we have carried out a wide survey of publicly available datasets suitable for data-driven learning of dialogue systems. We discuss important characteristics of these datasets, how they can be used to learn diverse dialogue strategies, and their other potential uses. We also examine methods for transfer learning between datasets and the use of external knowledge. Finally, we discuss appropriate choice of evaluation metrics for the learning objective.

The interplay between AI and Sentiment analysis is also a new area. There are already many synergies between AI and Sentiment analysis because many functions of AI apps need sentiment analysis features. "The common interest areas where Artificial Intelligence (AI) meets sentiment analysis can be viewed from four aspects of the problem and the aspects can be grouped as Object identification, Feature extraction, Orientation classification and Integration. The existing reported solutions or available systems are still far from being perfect or fail to meet the satisfaction level of the end users. The main issue may be that there are many conceptual rules that govern sentiment and there are even more clues (possibly unlimited) that can convey these concepts from realization to verbalization of a human being."

Technology innovations meet greatest success in business when these are entirely'client focussed'. Developments in the retail sector, which is consumer-led, are addressing client demand for more personalised, faster and competitive services. Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Sentiment Analysis are changing the way in which these services are offered. In particular Financial Organisations are creating and leveraging such innovation in the domain of wealth management. This trend is now being taken on board by multiple innovators: academia, start-ups, technology companies and financial market participants.

Topic models are one of the most popular methods for learning representations of text, but a major challenge is that any change to the topic model requires mathematically deriving a new inference algorithm. A promising approach to address this problem is autoencoding variational Bayes (AEVB), but it has proven diffi- cult to apply to topic models in practice. We present what is to our knowledge the first effective AEVB based inference method for latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), which we call Autoencoded Variational Inference For Topic Model (AVITM). This model tackles the problems caused for AEVB by the Dirichlet prior and by component collapsing. We find that AVITM matches traditional methods in accuracy with much better inference time. Indeed, because of the inference network, we find that it is unnecessary to pay the computational cost of running variational optimization on test data. Because AVITM is black box, it is readily applied to new topic models. As a dramatic illustration of this, we present a new topic model called ProdLDA, that replaces the mixture model in LDA with a product of experts. By changing only one line of code from LDA, we find that ProdLDA yields much more interpretable topics, even if LDA is trained via collapsed Gibbs sampling.

In an end-to-end dialog system, the aim of dialog state tracking is to accurately estimate a compact representation of the current dialog status from a sequence of noisy observations produced by the speech recognition and the natural language understanding modules. This paper introduces a novel method of dialog state tracking based on the general paradigm of machine reading and proposes to solve it using an End-to-End Memory Network, MemN2N, a memory-enhanced neural network architecture. We evaluate the proposed approach on the second Dialog State Tracking Challenge (DSTC-2) dataset. The corpus has been converted for the occasion in order to frame the hidden state variable inference as a question-answering task based on a sequence of utterances extracted from a dialog. We show that the proposed tracker gives encouraging results. Then, we propose to extend the DSTC-2 dataset with specific reasoning capabilities requirement like counting, list maintenance, yes-no question answering and indefinite knowledge management. Finally, we present encouraging results using our proposed MemN2N based tracking model.

This article was contributed by Mark Edmondson and Peter Meyer, both from IIH Nordic, specialists in online marketing and web communication headquartered in Copenhagen, Denmark. Many analytics specialists agree that Machine Learning is going to revolutionise the digital analytics industry in the future, as all the major vendors battle to provide Machine Learning APIs that offer to surface interesting features of your data. These APIs offer cloud solutions that you can use to both scale up your own models, or take advantage of pre-trained models. Following our presentation at Superweek Hungary 2017, we wanted to show how you could start using these services today to enhance your own digital analytics capabilities. Among all Machine Learning techniques, we chose Sentiment Analysis since it is a common use case, but the same code with small modifications could be used for any of the machine learning APIs offered by the services we chose, Algorithmia and Google Natural Language API.

Task-oriented dialog systems have been applied in various tasks, such as automated personal assistants, customer service providers and tutors. These systems work well when users have clear and explicit intentions that are well-aligned to the systems' capabilities. However, they fail if users intentions are not explicit. To address this shortcoming, we propose a framework to interleave non-task content (i.e. everyday social conversation) into task conversations. When the task content fails, the system can still keep the user engaged with the non-task content. We trained a policy using reinforcement learning algorithms to promote long-turn conversation coherence and consistency, so that the system can have smooth transitions between task and non-task content. To test the effectiveness of the proposed framework, we developed a movie promotion dialog system. Experiments with human users indicate that a system that interleaves social and task content achieves a better task success rate and is also rated as more engaging compared to a pure task-oriented system.

Some enterprises use Clarabridge to mine customer data, manage customer experience, and see sentiment analysis. While Clarabridge provides an intelligence platform, Signals is a more powerful solution platform in unifying customer voice. While sentiment analysis is a key function of Signals, its deep machine learning capability allows you to do something more organic. It enables you to listen to your customer data from the ground up and identify trends and patterns as they emerge. Signals results are displayed directly in front of the user.

Nested Chinese Restaurant Process (nCRP) topic models are powerful nonparametric Bayesian methods to extract a topic hierarchy from a given text corpus, where the hierarchical structure is automatically determined by the data. Hierarchical Latent Dirichlet Allocation (hLDA) is a popular instance of nCRP topic models. However, hLDA has only been evaluated at small scale, because the existing collapsed Gibbs sampling and instantiated weight variational inference algorithms either are not scalable or sacrifice inference quality with mean-field assumptions. Moreover, an efficient distributed implementation of the data structures, such as dynamically growing count matrices and trees, is challenging. In this paper, we propose a novel partially collapsed Gibbs sampling (PCGS) algorithm, which combines the advantages of collapsed and instantiated weight algorithms to achieve good scalability as well as high model quality. An initialization strategy is presented to further improve the model quality. Finally, we propose an efficient distributed implementation of PCGS through vectorization, pre-processing, and a careful design of the concurrent data structures and communication strategy. Empirical studies show that our algorithm is 111 times more efficient than the previous open-source implementation for hLDA, with comparable or even better model quality. Our distributed implementation can extract 1,722 topics from a 131-million-document corpus with 28 billion tokens, which is 4-5 orders of magnitude larger than the previous largest corpus, with 50 machines in 7 hours.

Over this course you will build multiple practical systems using natural language processing (NLP), the branch of machine learning and data science that deals with text and speech. You'll start with a background on NLP before diving in, building a spam detector and a model for sentiment analysis in Python. Learning how to build these practical tools will give you an excellent window into the mechanisms that drive machine learning. Build a spam detector & sentiment analysis model that may be used to predict the stock market Learn practical tools & techniques like the natural language toolkit library & latent semantic analysis Create an article spinner from scratch that can be used as an SEO tool Think this is cool? Check out the other bundles in this series, The Deep Learning and Artificial Intelligence Introductory Bundle, and The Advanced Guide to Deep Learning and Artificial Intelligence.