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Open-book question answering is a subset of question answering (QA) tasks where the system aims to find answers in a given set of documents (open-book) and common knowledge about a topic. This article proposes a solution for answering natural language questions from a corpus of Amazon Web Services (AWS) technical documents with no domain-specific labeled data (zero-shot). These questions have a yes–no–none

As quantum computers approach the fault tolerance threshold, diagnosing and characterizing the noise on large scale quantum devices is increasingly important. One of the most important classes of noise channels is the class of Pauli channels, for reasons of both theoretical tractability and experimental relevance. Here we present a practical algorithm for estimating the s nonzero Pauli error rates in an

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 fourth iteration of the competition, university teams have incorporated semantic parsing, common

We are completing the 4th year of the Alexa Prize Socialbot Grand Challenge that aims to advance human-computer interaction through conversations. 9 university teams participated in this year’s challenge to create socialbots that can converse coherently and engagingly with humans on a range of current events and popular topics such as entertainment, sports, politics, technology, and fashion. The supported

The open domain-dialogue system Alquist has a goal to conduct a coherent and engaging conversation that can be considered as one of the benchmarks of social intelligence. The fourth version of the system, developed within the Alexa Prize Socialbot Grand Challenge 4, brings two main innovations. The first addresses coherence, and the second addresses the engagingness of the conversation. For innovations

We present a chatbot implementing a novel dialogue management approach based on logical inference. Instead of framing conversation a sequence of response generation tasks, we model conversation as a collaborative inference process in which speakers share information to synthesize new knowledge in real time. Our chatbot pipeline accomplishes this modelling in three broad stages. The first stage translates

In this report, we present the DREAM 2 Socialbot design and share scientific and technology contributions made towards developing a fluent and meaningful socialbot for Alexa Prize 4. Building on top of the last year’s solution we added a rich plethora of the script-driven skills created with the help of the novel Dialogue Flow Framework. To lay down the foundation for the discourse-driven dialogue strategy

This paper describes the architecture, methodology and results of the Genuine2 chatbot for the Alexa Socialbot Grand Challenge 4. In contrast to previous years, our bot heavily relies on the usage of different types of generative models coordinated through on a dialogue management policy that targets dialogue coherence and topic continuity. Different dialogue generators were incorporated to give variability

We present Viola, an open-domain dialogue system for spoken conversation that uses a topic-agnostic dialogue manager based on a simple generate-and-rank ap- proach. Leveraging recent advances of generative dialogue systems powered by large language models, Viola fetches a batch of response candidates from various neural dialogue models trained with different datasets and knowledge-grounding inputs. Additional

Recommending sets of items that include both personalized and compatible items is crucial to personalized styling programs such as Amazon’s Personal Shopper. There is both an extensive literature on learning generic fashion compatibility and also on personalization in fashion. However, recommending pairs of items that the customer would like to wear together is still less studied as it involves learning

Training neural machine translation (NMT) models in federated learning (FL) settings could be inefficient both computationally and communication-wise, due to the large size of translation engines as well as the multiple rounds of updates required to train clients and a central server. In this paper, we explore how to efficiently build NMT models in an FL setup by proposing a novel solution. In order to

Adversarial attack on question answering systems over tabular data (TableQA) can help evaluate to what extent TableQA systems can understand natural language questions and reason with tables. However, generating natural language adversarial questions is difficult, because even a single character swap could lead to huge semantic difference in human perception. In this paper, we propose SAGE (Semantically

Many complex time series can be effectively subdivided into distinct regimes that exhibit persistent dynamics. Discovering the switching behavior and the statistical patterns in these regimes is important for understanding the underlying dynamical system. We propose the Recurrent Explicit Duration Switching Dynamical System (RED-SDS), a flexible model that is capable of identifying both state- and time-dependent

In this paper, we present the second iteration of Chirpy Cardinal, an open-domain dialogue agent developed for the Alexa Prize SGC4 competition. Building on the success of the SGC3 Chirpy, we focus on improving conversational flexibility, initiative, and coherence. We introduce a variety of methods for controllable neural generation, ranging from prefix-based neural decoding over a symbolic scaffolding,

In this paper, we present our Alexa Prize Grand Challenge 4 socialbot: Proto. Leveraging diverse sources of world knowledge, and powered by a suite of neural and rule-based natural language understanding modules, state-of-the-art neural generators, novel state-based deterministic generators, an ensemble of neural re- rankers, a robust post-processing algorithm, and an efficient overall conversation strategy

We report on the design and development of the CASPR system, a socialbot designed to compete in the Amazon Alexa Socialbot Challenge 4. CASPR’s distin- guishing characteristic is that it will use automated commonsense reasoning to truly “understand” dialogs, allowing it to converse like a human. Three main require- ments of a socialbot are that it should be able to “understand” users’ utterances, possess

This report explains why cloud computing supports a variety of power system businesses and summarizes the latest cloud adoption use cases in the power industry. It includes the benefits and risks of moving to the cloud while suggesting risk mitigation strategies at t he same time. It also provides valuable guidelines and suggestions for power industry professionals who are considering cloud solutions yet

We present a privacy preserving machine learning method for images that separates task-relevant information from task-irrelevant information. Our primary hypothesis is that by revealing the minimal number of pixels required for a task we can provide the most privacy preserving guarantees. Specifically, we propose an adversarial method that masks out task-irrelevant information from an image for preserving

The paradigm of pre-training followed by finetuning has become a standard procedure for NLP tasks, with a known problem of domain shift between the pre-training and downstream corpus. Previous works have tried to mitigate this problem with additional pre-training, either on the downstream corpus itself when it is large enough, or on a manually curated unlabeled corpus of a similar domain. In this paper,

Calibration means that forecasts and average realized frequencies are close. We develop the concept of forecast hedging, which consists of choosing the forecasts so as to guarantee that the expected track record can only improve. This yields all the calibration results by the same simple basic argument while differentiating between them by the forecast-hedging tools used: deterministic and fixed point based