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This report describes Athena, a dialogue system for spoken conversation on popular topics and current events. We develop a flexible topic-agnostic approach to dialogue management that dynamically configures dialogue based on general principles of entity and topic coherence. Athena’s dialogue manager uses a contract-based method where discourse constraints are dispatched to clusters of response generators

Tartan is a social bot that engages users in sharing daily personal experiences in multiple domains. Our work contributes to Conversational AI in two aspects: 1) We extract common-sense knowledge expressed in large-scale user utterances in conversations, and find that more than 20% of the shared information is related to personal life, such as social relationships and individual activities. 2) Based on

Building a dialogue system able to talk fluently and meaningfully in an open domain conversation is one of the foundational challenges in the field of AI. Recent progress in NLP driven by the application of the deep neural networks and large language models opened new possibilities to solve many hard problems of the conversational AI. Alexa Prize Socialbot Grand Challenge gives a unique opportunity to test

We propose Bernard: a framework for an engaging open-domain socialbot. While the task of open-domain dialog generation remains a difficult one, we explore various strategies to generate coherent dialog given an arbitrary dialog history. We incorporate a stateful autonomous dialog manager using non-deterministic finite automata to control multi-turn conversations. We show that powerful pretrained language

We describe the ZOTBOT system for open-ended conversations, designed for the Alexa Prize competition. We focus on two main shortcomings in existing conversational agents: lack of awareness in commonsense reasoning when responding to user utterances (resulting in nonsensical or uninteresting responses) and inability to understand semantics and converse naturally about fact-based articles in a compelling

Conversational Intelligence requires that a person engage on informational, personal and relational levels. Advances in Natural Language Understanding have helped recent chatbots succeed at dialog on the informational level. However, current techniques still lag for conversing with humans on a personal level and fully relating to them. The University of Michigan’s submission to the Alexa Prize Grand Challenge

Kernel methods are popular and effective techniques for learning on structured data, such as trees and graphs. One of their major drawbacks is the computational cost related to making a prediction on an example, which manifests in the classification phase for batch kernel methods, and especially in online learning algorithms. In this paper, we analyze how to speed up the prediction when the kernel function

The building block of Transformer can be seen as inducing message passing over a complete graph whose nodes correspond to input tokens. Such dense connections make the Transformer data-hungry. Star-Transformer exploits short-term dependencies more heavily by keeping the connections between adjacent tokens but relaying long dependencies via a central node, thereby reducing the number of connections from

Modern deep learning applications urge to push the model inference taking place at the edge devices for multiple reasons such as achieving shorter latency, relieving the burden of the network connecting to the cloud, and protecting user privacy. The Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is one of the most widely used model family in the applications. Given the high computational complexity of the CNN models

In this paper we address the problem of detecting previously unseen novel audio events in the presence of real-life acoustic backgrounds. Specifically, during training, we learn subspaces corresponding to each acoustic background, and during testing the audio frame in question is decomposed into a component that lies on the mixture of subspaces and a super gaussian outlier component.Based on the energy

We examine the impact of "big data" on firm performance in the context of forecast accuracy using proprietary retail sales data obtained from Amazon. We measure the accuracy of forecasts in two relevant dimensions: the number of products (N), and the number of time periods for which a product is available for sale (T). Theory suggests diminishing returns to larger N and T, with relative forecast errors

In this paper, we introduce an Augmented Lagrangian based method in a search relevance ranking algorithm to incorporate the multi-dimensional nature of relevance and business constraints, both of which are the requirements for building relevance ranking models in production. The off-the-shelf solutions cannot handle such complex objectives and therefore, modelers are left hand-tuning of parameters that

Building open domain conversational systems that allow users to have engaging conversations on topics of their choice is a challenging task. The Alexa Prize Socialbot Grand Challenge was launched in 2016 to tackle the problem of achieving natural, sustained, coherent and engaging open-domain dialogs. In the third iteration of the competition, university teams have moved the needle on the state of the art

The need for high-quality, large-scale, goal-oriented dialogue datasets continues to grow as virtual assistants become increasingly widespread. However, existing publicly available datasets useful for this area are limited either in their size, linguistic diversity, domain coverage, or annotation granularity. We introduce the MultiDoGO dataset to overcome these limitations. With a total of over 65,000 dialogues

We introduce a method to generate vectorial representations of visual classification tasks that can be used to reason about the nature of those tasks and their relations. Given a dataset with ground-truth labels and a loss function, we process images through a “probe network” and compute an embedding based on estimates of the Fisher information matrix associated with the probe network parameters. This provides

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has achieved state-of-the-art results in domains such as robotics and games. We build on this previous work by applying RL algorithms to a selection of canonical online stochastic optimization problems with a range of practical applications: Bin Packing, Newsvendor, and Vehicle Routing. While there is a nascent literature that applies RL to these problems, there are no commonly

Dialogue assistants are used by millions of people today to fulfill a variety of tasks. Such assistants also serve as a digital marketplace where any developer can build a domain-specific, task-oriented, dialogue agent offering a service such as booking cabs, ordering food, listening to music, shopping etc. Also, these agents may interact with each other, when completing a task on behalf of the user. Accomplishing

We propose a novel neural topic model in the Wasserstein autoencoders (WAE) framework. Unlike existing variational autoencoder based models, we directly enforce Dirichlet prior on the latent document-topic vectors. We exploit the structure of the latent space and apply a suitable kernel in minimizing the Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) to perform distribution matching. We discover that MMD performs much

Amazon SageMaker Debugger automates the debugging process of machine learning training jobs. From training jobs, Debugger allows you to run your own training script (Zero Script Change experience) using Debugger built-in features—Hook and Rule—to capture tensors, have flexibility to build customized Hooks and Rules for configuring tensors as you want, and make the tensors available for analysis by saving

MLIO is a high performance data access library for machine learning tasks with support for multiple data formats. It makes it easy for scientists to train models on their data without worrying about the format or where it's stored. Algorithm developers can also use MLIO to build production-quality algorithms that support a rich variety of data formats and provide helpful parsing and validation messages