Search results

Each with our own experiences and unique value, we plan to tackle the challenge of creating an active listening, heartwarming, and understanding social bot.

We envision to build an enjoyable, personalized, and dynamic social-bot that is able to engage in deep conversations across topics and adapt to different user types.

Building conversational systems that enable natural language interactions with machines has been attractive to mankind since the early days of computing, as exemplified by earlier text-based systems such as ELIZA [Weizenbaum, 1966]. Previous work on conversational systems generally falls into two categories, task-oriented and socialbots. Task-oriented systems aim to help users accomplish a specific task

In this paper we introduce a new publicly available dataset for verification against textual sources, FEVER: Fact Extraction and VERification. It consists of 185,445 claims generated by altering sentences extracted from Wikipedia and subsequently verified without knowledge of the sentence they were derived from. The claims are classified as SUPPORTED, REFUTED or NOTENOUGHINFO by annotators achieving 0.6841

Recent advances in automatic speech recognition lead toward enabling a voice conversation between a human user and an intelligent virtual assistant. This provides a potential foundation for developing artificial personal shoppers for e-commerce websites, such as Alibaba, Amazon, and eBay. Personal shoppers are valuable to the on-line shops as they enhance user engagement and trust by promptly dealing with

Representation learning is an essential problem in a wide range of applications and it is important for performing downstream tasks successfully. In this paper, we propose a new model that learns coupled representations of domains, intents, and slots by taking advantage of their hierarchical dependency in a Spoken Language Understanding system. Our proposed model learns the vector representation of intents

In the past few years, advances in artificial intelligence have captured our imaginations and led to the widespread use of voice services on our phones and in our homes.

In June 2018, Amazon announced the 11 focus areas of the 2018 Amazon Research Awards.

New machine-learned multilingual named-entity transliteration system.

This paper proposes a Region-based Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network (R-CRNN) for audio event detection (AED). The proposed network is inspired by Faster-RCNN [1], a wellknown region-based convolutional network framework for visual object detection. Different from the original Faster-RCNN, a recurrent layer is added on top of the convolutional network to capture the long-term temporal context from

In this paper, we investigate the challenges of using reinforcement learning agents for question-answering over knowledge graphs for real-world applications. We examine the performance metrics used by state-of-the-art systems and determine that they are inadequate for such settings. More specifically, they do not evaluate the systems correctly for situations when there is no answer available and thus agents

We tackle the problem of optimizing a blackbox objective function defined over a highly structured input space. This problem is ubiquitous in machine learning. Inferring the structure of a neural network or the Automatic Statistician (AS), where the kernel combination for a Gaussian process is optimized, are two of many possible examples. We use the AS as a case study to describe our approach, that can

Amazon scientists are continuously expanding Alexa’s natural-language-understanding (NLU) capabilities to make Alexa smarter, more useful, and more engaging.

This paper describes the Tartan conversational agent built for the 2018 Alexa Prize Competition. Tartan is a non-goal-oriented socialbot focused around providing users with an engaging and fluent casual conversation. Tartan’s key features include an emphasis on structured conversation based on flexible finite-state models and an approach focused on understanding and using conversational acts. To provide

In recent years, the amount of textual information produced daily has increased exponentially. This information explosion has been accelerated by the ease with which data can be shared across the web. Most of the textual information is generated as free-form text, and only a small fraction is available in structured format (Wikidata, Freebase etc.) that can be processed and analyzed directly by machines.

We are EVE, a team of researchers from the Brigham Young University Perception, Control, and Cognition Laboratory, and we've been accepted to the Amazon Alexa Prize Challenge.

This paper describes a new open domain dialogue system Alquist developed as part of the Alexa Prize competition for the Amazon Echo line of products. The Alquist dialogue system is designed to conduct a coherent and engaging conversation on popular topics. We are presenting a hybrid system combining several machine learning and rule based approaches. We discuss and describe the Alquist pipeline, data acquisition

Named for our university's mascot, Gunrock, our team is a group of students who all share a passion for improving everyday human experiences through artificial intelligence.

In this paper we introduce a novel, open domain socialbot for the Amazon Alexa Prize competition, aimed at carrying on friendly conversations with users on a variety of topics. We present our modular system, highlighting our different data sources and how we use the human mind as a model for data management. Additionally we build and employ natural language understanding and information retrieval tools

Team SlugBot is proud to represent the Natural Language and Dialogue Systems laboratory at UC Santa Cruz.