Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) has been prominently employed for parameterefficient fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs). However, the limited expressive capacity of LoRA, stemming from the low-rank constraint, has been recognized as a bottleneck, particularly in rigorous tasks like code generation and mathematical reasoning. To address this limitation, we introduce Rank-Sharing Low-Rank Adaptation (RaSA), an innovative extension that enhances the expressive capacity of LoRA by leveraging partial rank sharing across layers. By forming a shared rank pool and applying layer-specific weighting, RaSA effectively increases the number of ranks without augmenting parameter overhead. Our theoretically grounded and empirically validated approach demonstrates that RaSA not only maintains the core advantages of LoRA but also significantly boosts performance in challenging code and math tasks. Code, data and scripts are available at: https://github.com/zwhe99/RaSA. Low-rank adaptation (LoRA, Hu et al. (2022)) has become a de facto parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) method for adapting large language models (LLMs) to specific downstream tasks. Its core idea is to constrain the parameter updates to be low-rank, which significantly reduces the number of trainable parameters and allows them to be merged back into the original model, thereby avoiding additional inference latency.

Chatbots have become integral to various application domains, including those with safety-critical considerations. As a result, there is a pressing need for methods that ensure chatbots consistently adhere to expected, safe behaviours. In this paper, we introduce RV4Chatbot, a Runtime Verification framework designed to monitor deviations in chatbot behaviour. We formalise expected behaviours as interaction protocols between the user and the chatbot. We present the RV4Chatbot design and describe two implementations that instantiate it: RV4Rasa, for monitoring chatbots created with the Rasa framework, and RV4Dialogflow, for monitoring Dialogflow chatbots. Additionally, we detail experiments conducted in a factory automation scenario using both RV4Rasa and RV4Dialogflow.

The quality is a crucial issue for crowd annotations. Answer aggregation is an important type of solution. The aggregated answers estimated from multiple crowd answers to the same instance are the eventually collected annotations, rather than the individual crowd answers themselves. Recently, the capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) on data annotation tasks has attracted interest from researchers. Most of the existing studies mainly focus on the average performance of individual crowd workers; several recent works studied the scenarios of aggregation on categorical labels and LLMs used as label creators. However, the scenario of aggregation on text answers and the role of LLMs as aggregators are not yet well-studied. In this paper, we investigate the capability of LLMs as aggregators in the scenario of close-ended crowd text answer aggregation. We propose a human-LLM hybrid text answer aggregation method with a Creator-Aggregator Multi-Stage (CAMS) crowdsourcing framework. We make the experiments based on public crowdsourcing datasets. The results show the effectiveness of our approach based on the collaboration of crowd workers and LLMs.

We release Rasa, the first multilingual expressive TTS dataset for any Indian language, which contains 10 hours of neutral speech and 1-3 hours of expressive speech for each of the 6 Ekman emotions covering 3 languages: Assamese, Bengali, & Tamil. Our ablation studies reveal that just 1 hour of neutral and 30 minutes of expressive data can yield a Fair system as indicated by MUSHRA scores. Increasing neutral data to 10 hours, with minimal expressive data, significantly enhances expressiveness. This offers a practical recipe for resource-constrained languages, prioritizing easily obtainable neutral data alongside smaller amounts of expressive data. We show the importance of syllabically balanced data and pooling emotions to enhance expressiveness. We also highlight challenges in generating specific emotions, e.g., fear and surprise.

Conversational AIs, or chatbots, mimic human speech when conversing. Smart assistants facilitate the automation of several tasks that needed human intervention earlier. Because of their accuracy, absence of dependence on human resources, and accessibility around the clock, chatbots can be employed in vehicles too. Due to people's propensity to divert their attention away from the task of driving while engaging in other activities like calling, playing music, navigation, and getting updates on the weather forecast and latest news, road safety has declined and accidents have increased as a result. It would be advantageous to automate these tasks using voice commands rather than carrying them out manually. This paper focuses on the development of a voice-based smart assistance application for vehicles based on the RASA framework. The smart assistant provides functionalities like navigation, communication via calls, getting weather forecasts and the latest news updates, and music that are completely voice-based in nature.

Sanskrit poetry has played a significant role in shaping the literary and cultural landscape of the Indian subcontinent for centuries. However, not much attention has been devoted to uncovering the hidden beauty of Sanskrit poetry in computational linguistics. This article explores the intersection of Sanskrit poetry and computational linguistics by proposing a roadmap of an interpretable framework to analyze and classify the qualities and characteristics of fine Sanskrit poetry. We discuss the rich tradition of Sanskrit poetry and the significance of computational linguistics in automatically identifying the characteristics of fine poetry. The proposed framework involves a human-in-the-loop approach that combines deterministic aspects delegated to machines and deep semantics left to human experts. We provide a deep analysis of Siksastaka, a Sanskrit poem, from the perspective of 6 prominent kavyashastra schools, to illustrate the proposed framework. Additionally, we provide compound, dependency, anvaya (prose order linearised form), meter, rasa (mood), alankar (figure of speech), and riti (writing style) annotations for Siksastaka and a web application to illustrate the poem's analysis and annotations. Our key contributions include the proposed framework, the analysis of Siksastaka, the annotations and the web application for future research. Link for interactive analysis: https://sanskritshala.github.io/shikshastakam/

Machine learning (ML) enabled systems are emerging with recent breakthroughs in ML. A model-centric view is widely taken by the literature to focus only on the analysis of ML models. However, only a small body of work takes a system view that looks at how ML components work with the system and how they affect software engineering for MLenabled systems. In this paper, we adopt this system view, and conduct a case study on Rasa 3.0, an industrial dialogue system that has been widely adopted by various companies around the world. Our goal is to characterize the complexity of such a largescale ML-enabled system and to understand the impact of the complexity on testing. Our study reveals practical implications for software engineering for ML-enabled systems.

The latest edition of our flagship learning series on everything in and about data analytics is sure to excite your minds, be prepared for the DataHour on Building your First Chatbot using Open Source Tools. The session will be hosted by Dr. Rachael Tatman- Staff Developer Advocate at Rasa, the world's leading conversational AI platform, that enables enterprises to revamp customer experience with cutting-edge open-source machine learning implementations. In this session, you will be led on an engaging journey of using the open-source platform Rasa, and the lecture will be helmed by an ex-Googler and an instructor at the University of Michigan, Dr. Rachael Tatman. The session is for both freshers and professionals alike who would like to design chatbots to improve the CX for their organisations or simply get hands-on experience with open source tools like Rasa. Chatbots have been around for some time.

I hope you read and enjoyed my previous blog titled'Introduction to Rasa X' since it is a precursor to this one. In case you haven't, you can read it here. In this blog, I am going to lead you through the installation, folder structure, controls, and features of Rasa as well as Rasa X to develop an assistant. Let's first dive into installing Rasa. To install Rasa, you require Python 3.7 or Python 3.8.

Chatbots are conversational user interfaces increasingly popular in many applications such as IT service desk, customer service, sales support, commerce, advisory services, etc. There are two types of chatbots, i.e., generalist and task-oriented bots. Generalist chatbots are all-purpose and complex, e.g. Siri, which requires knowledge in many domains. Task-specific bots are much simpler but work efficiently within certain areas such as FAQ.