Goto

Collaborating Authors

 Personal Assistant Systems


Experts-in-the-Loop: Establishing an Effective Workflow in Crafting Privacy Q&A

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Privacy policies play a vital role in safeguarding user privacy as legal jurisdictions worldwide emphasize the need for transparent data processing. While the suitability of privacy policies to enhance transparency has been critically discussed, employing conversational AI systems presents unique challenges in informing users effectively. In this position paper, we propose a dynamic workflow for transforming privacy policies into privacy question-and-answer (Q&A) pairs to make privacy policies easily accessible through conversational AI. Thereby, we facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration among legal experts and conversation designers, while also considering the utilization of large language models' generative capabilities and addressing associated challenges. Our proposed workflow underscores continuous improvement and monitoring throughout the construction of privacy Q&As, advocating for comprehensive review and refinement through an experts-in-the-loop approach.


Utilizing Speech Emotion Recognition and Recommender Systems for Negative Emotion Handling in Therapy Chatbots

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Emotional well-being significantly influences mental health and overall quality of life. As therapy chatbots become increasingly prevalent, their ability to comprehend and respond empathetically to users' emotions remains limited. This paper addresses this limitation by proposing an approach to enhance therapy chatbots with auditory perception, enabling them to understand users' feelings and provide human-like empathy. The proposed method incorporates speech emotion recognition (SER) techniques using Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models and the ShEMO dataset to accurately detect and classify negative emotions, including anger, fear, and sadness. The SER model achieves a validation accuracy of 88%, demonstrating its effectiveness in recognizing emotional states from speech signals. Furthermore, a recommender system is developed, leveraging the SER model's output to generate personalized recommendations for managing negative emotions, for which a new bilingual dataset was generated as well since there is no such dataset available for this task. The recommender model achieves an accuracy of 98% by employing a combination of global vectors for word representation (GloVe) and LSTM models. To provide a more immersive and empathetic user experience, a text-to-speech model called GlowTTS is integrated, enabling the therapy chatbot to audibly communicate the generated recommendations to users in both English and Persian. The proposed approach offers promising potential to enhance therapy chatbots by providing them with the ability to recognize and respond to users' emotions, ultimately improving the delivery of mental health support for both English and Persian-speaking users.


SBTRec- A Transformer Framework for Personalized Tour Recommendation Problem with Sentiment Analysis

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

When traveling to an unfamiliar city for holidays, tourists often rely on guidebooks, travel websites, or recommendation systems to plan their daily itineraries and explore popular points of interest (POIs). However, these approaches may lack optimization in terms of time feasibility, localities, and user preferences. In this paper, we propose the SBTRec algorithm: a BERT-based Trajectory Recommendation with sentiment analysis, for recommending personalized sequences of POIs as itineraries. The key contributions of this work include analyzing users' check-ins and uploaded photos to understand the relationship between POI visits and distance. We introduce SBTRec, which encompasses sentiment analysis to improve recommendation accuracy by understanding users' preferences and satisfaction levels from reviews and comments about different POIs. Our proposed algorithms are evaluated against other sequence prediction methods using datasets from 8 cities. The results demonstrate that SBTRec achieves an average F1 score of 61.45%, outperforming baseline algorithms. The paper further discusses the flexibility of the SBTRec algorithm, its ability to adapt to different scenarios and cities without modification, and its potential for extension by incorporating additional information for more reliable predictions. Overall, SBTRec provides personalized and relevant POI recommendations, enhancing tourists' overall trip experiences. Future work includes fine-tuning personalized embeddings for users, with evaluation of users' comments on POIs,~to further enhance prediction accuracy.


Gen Z is comfortable with multiple sex partners, study finds 57% 'willing to consider' non-monogamy

FOX News

Ashley Madison chief strategy officer Paul Keable insists people would be cheating whether or not the controversial'dating' site existed. Gen Z appears to be more comfortable with the concept of non-monogamy than previous generations, according to controversial online "dating" service Ashley Madison. The polarizing Ashley Madison, which caters to people looking to cheat on their partners and uses the slogan "Life is short. Have an affair," said that Gen Z is the top age group to sign up for their scandalous product and accounted for 40% of new members in 2022. To understand why so many members of Gen Z, defined as those 18-29 years old, are joining the pro-adultery site, the company surveyed their Gen Z members as well as those ages in the general population across 10 countries via YouGov.


Trustworthy Recommender Systems

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Recommender systems (RSs) aim to help users to effectively retrieve items of their interests from a large catalogue. For a quite long period of time, researchers and practitioners have been focusing on developing accurate RSs. Recent years have witnessed an increasing number of threats to RSs, coming from attacks, system and user generated noise, system bias. As a result, it has become clear that a strict focus on RS accuracy is limited and the research must consider other important factors, e.g., trustworthiness. For end users, a trustworthy RS (TRS) should not only be accurate, but also transparent, unbiased and fair as well as robust to noise or attacks. These observations actually led to a paradigm shift of the research on RSs: from accuracy-oriented RSs to TRSs. However, researchers lack a systematic overview and discussion of the literature in this novel and fast developing field of TRSs. To this end, in this paper, we provide an overview of TRSs, including a discussion of the motivation and basic concepts of TRSs, a presentation of the challenges in building TRSs, and a perspective on the future directions in this area. We also provide a novel conceptual framework to support the construction of TRSs.


Emotion-Aware Music Recommendation System: Enhancing User Experience Through Real-Time Emotional Context

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This study addresses the deficiency in conventional music recommendation systems by focusing on the vital role of emotions in shaping users music choices. These systems often disregard the emotional context, relying predominantly on past listening behavior and failing to consider the dynamic and evolving nature of users emotional preferences. This gap leads to several limitations. Users may receive recommendations that do not match their current mood, which diminishes the quality of their music experience. Furthermore, without accounting for emotions, the systems might overlook undiscovered or lesser-known songs that have a profound emotional impact on users. To combat these limitations, this research introduces an AI model that incorporates emotional context into the song recommendation process. By accurately detecting users real-time emotions, the model can generate personalized song recommendations that align with the users emotional state. This approach aims to enhance the user experience by offering music that resonates with their current mood, elicits the desired emotions, and creates a more immersive and meaningful listening experience. By considering emotional context in the song recommendation process, the proposed model offers an opportunity for a more personalized and emotionally resonant musical journey.


Parrot-Trained Adversarial Examples: Pushing the Practicality of Black-Box Audio Attacks against Speaker Recognition Models

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Audio adversarial examples (AEs) have posed significant security challenges to real-world speaker recognition systems. Most black-box attacks still require certain information from the speaker recognition model to be effective (e.g., keeping probing and requiring the knowledge of similarity scores). This work aims to push the practicality of the black-box attacks by minimizing the attacker's knowledge about a target speaker recognition model. Although it is not feasible for an attacker to succeed with completely zero knowledge, we assume that the attacker only knows a short (or a few seconds) speech sample of a target speaker. Without any probing to gain further knowledge about the target model, we propose a new mechanism, called parrot training, to generate AEs against the target model. Motivated by recent advancements in voice conversion (VC), we propose to use the one short sentence knowledge to generate more synthetic speech samples that sound like the target speaker, called parrot speech. Then, we use these parrot speech samples to train a parrot-trained(PT) surrogate model for the attacker. Under a joint transferability and perception framework, we investigate different ways to generate AEs on the PT model (called PT-AEs) to ensure the PT-AEs can be generated with high transferability to a black-box target model with good human perceptual quality. Real-world experiments show that the resultant PT-AEs achieve the attack success rates of 45.8% - 80.8% against the open-source models in the digital-line scenario and 47.9% - 58.3% against smart devices, including Apple HomePod (Siri), Amazon Echo, and Google Home, in the over-the-air scenario.


Talk the Walk: Synthetic Data Generation for Conversational Music Recommendation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Recommender systems are ubiquitous yet often difficult for users to control, and adjust if recommendation quality is poor. This has motivated conversational recommender systems (CRSs), with control provided through natural language feedback. However, as with most application domains, building robust CRSs requires training data that reflects system usage$\unicode{x2014}$here conversations with user utterances paired with items that cover a wide range of preferences. This has proved challenging to collect scalably using conventional methods. We address the question of whether it can be generated synthetically, building on recent advances in natural language. We evaluate in the setting of item set recommendation, noting the increasing attention to this task motivated by use cases like music, news, and recipe recommendation. We present TalkTheWalk, which synthesizes realistic high-quality conversational data by leveraging domain expertise encoded in widely available curated item collections, generating a sequence of hypothetical yet plausible item sets, then using a language model to produce corresponding user utterances. We generate over one million diverse playlist curation conversations in the music domain, and show these contain consistent utterances with relevant item sets nearly matching the quality of an existing but small human-collected dataset for this task. We demonstrate the utility of the generated synthetic dataset on a conversational item retrieval task and show that it improves over both unsupervised baselines and systems trained on a real dataset.


Amazon's Echo Show 5 falls to a record low of $40 in a Black Friday deal

Engadget

The Amazon Echo Show 5 smart display is on sale for $40 as part of an early Black Friday deal. This matches a record low price for the device and represents a savings of more than 50 percent, as the typical MSRP for the display is $90. The sale applies to various colorways, including white, charcoal and blue. This discount is only for the device itself, so you'll have to pay extra for accessories like a stand. The Echo Show 5 finds a lot of use as a smart home controller, so Amazon also sells bundles that ship with smart light bulbs, the Blink Mini security camera and an Alexa Emergency Assist subscription.


Top 20 American cities for 'adulterous behavior' revealed by controversial dating service Ashley Madison

FOX News

Ashley Madison chief strategy officer Paul Keable insists people would be cheating whether the controversial dating site existed. EXCLUSIVE – Florida residents might want to keep a close eye on their spouses this winter. Controversial online dating service Ashley Madison, which caters to married people and uses the slogan "Life is short. Have an affair," examined where members reside to determine "hotspots across the world when it comes to adulterous behavior." Keable explained that millions of single Americans look for companionship during the cold winter months, which is often dubbed "cuffing season."