While conversing with chatbots, humans typically tend to ask many questions, a significant portion of which can be answered by referring to large-scale knowledge graphs (KG). While Question Answering (QA) and dialog systems have been studied independently, there is a need to study them closely to evaluate such real-world scenarios faced by bots involving both these tasks. Towards this end, we introduce the task of Complex Sequential QA which combines the two tasks of (i) answering factual questions through complex inferencing over a realistic-sized KG of millions of entities, and (ii) learning to converse through a series of coherently linked QA pairs. Through a labor intensive semi-automatic process, involving in-house and crowdsourced workers, we created a dataset containing around 200K dialogs with a total of 1.6M turns. Further, unlike existing large scale QA datasets which contain simple questions that can be answered from a single tuple, the questions in our dialogs require a larger subgraph of the KG. Specifically, our dataset has questions which require logical, quantitative, and comparative reasoning as well as their combinations. This calls for models which can: (i) parse complex natural language questions, (ii) use conversation context to resolve coreferences and ellipsis in utterances, (iii) ask for clarifications for ambiguous queries, and finally (iv) retrieve relevant subgraphs of the KG to answer such questions. However, our experiments with a combination of state of the art dialog and QA models show that they clearly do not achieve the above objectives and are inadequate for dealing with such complex real world settings. We believe that this new dataset coupled with the limitations of existing models as reported in this paper should encourage further research in Complex Sequential QA.

In reinforcement learning (RL), rewards have been considered the most important feedback in understanding the environment. However, recently there have been interesting forays into other modes such as using sporadic supervisory inputs. This brings into the learning process richer information about the world of interest. In this paper, we model these supervisory inputs as specific types of instructions that provide information in the form of an expert's control decision and certain structural regularities in the state space. We further provide a mathematical formulation for the same and propose a framework to incorporate them into the learning process.

In reinforcement learning (RL), rewards have been considered the most important feedback in understanding the environment. However, recently there have been interesting forays into other modes such as using sporadic supervisory inputs. This brings into the learning process richer information about the world of interest. In this paper, we model these supervisory inputs as specific types of instructions that provide information in the form of an expert's control decision and certain structural regularities in the state space. We further provide a mathematical formulation for the same and propose a framework to incorporate them into the learning process.

India is a multilingual and multicultural country that came together less than a century ago. The artificial intelligence community, which gained in strength in the eighties, has had a major focus on research directed towards societal goals of bridging the linguistic and educational divide, and delivers the fruits of information technology to all people. In this article we look at a brief history followed by two examples of research aimed at crossing the language barriers.

The second was the propensity of the computing industry toward more lucrative assignments in the service sector. Both these factors are changing, not least because leading international software companies have set up research and development centers in the country. Computer science education established itself in India in the early 1980s when the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) set up computer science departments and started offering undergraduate programs in the discipline. Research in artificial intelligence took off soon afterward when the government of India launched the Knowledge Based Computing Systems (KBCS) program in conjunction with the United Nations Development Program (Saint-Dizier 1991). A number of nodal centers were set up to focus on different areas of research including expert systems (IIT Madras), speech processing (Tata Institue of Fundamental Research), parallel processing (Indian Institute for Science), image processing (Indian Statistical Institute), and natural language processing (Center for Development of Advanced Computing).