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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.

This morning, I am delivering a keynote talk at the World Wide Web Conference in Lyon, France, with the title, Conversational AI for Interacting with the Digital and Physical World.

The Amazon Echo is a hands-free smart home speaker you control with your voice. The first important step in enabling a delightful customer experience with an Echo or other Alexa-enabled device is wake word detection, so accurate detection of “Alexa” or substitute wake words is critical. It is challenging to build a wake word system with low error rates when there are limited computation resources on the device and it's in the presence of background noise such as speech or music.

Just as Alexa can wake up without the need to press a button, she also automatically detects when a user finishes her query and expects a response. This task is often called “end-of-utterance detection,” “end-of-query detection,” “end-of-turn detection,” or simply “end-pointing.”

We are the team Alquist from CTU, Prague, Czech Republic.

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

Our international team of 8 PhD students and faculty advisors has a wide range of experience from both academic and industrial research.

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.

We are the Tartan team from Carnegie Mellon University; a diverse team of researchers interested in advancing the state of conversational AI.

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.

KTH has a long history of research on conversational systems. Our team of graduate and undergraduate students has a wide range of expertise in linguistics, cognitive science, machine learning and artificial intelligence.

We are a team of student researchers from the IRLab at Emory University with enthusiasm in the advancement of conversational AI.

The performance of Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models relies heavily on the availability of sufficient amounts of parallel data, and an efficient and effective way of leveraging the vastly available amounts of monolingual data has yet to be found. We propose to modify the decoder in a neural sequence-to-sequence model to enable multi-task learning for two strongly related tasks: target-side language

We describe SOCKEYE, 1 an open-source sequence-to-sequence toolkit for Neural Machine Translation (NMT). SOCKEYE is a production-ready framework for training and applying models as well as an experimental platform for researchers. Written in Python and built on MXNET, the toolkit offers scalable training and inference for the three most prominent encoder-decoder architectures: attentional recurrent neural

We propose a framework for general probabilistic multi-step time series regression. Specifically, we exploit the expressiveness and temporal nature of Sequence-to-Sequence Neural Networks (e.g. recurrent and convolutional structures), the nonparametric nature of Quantile Regression and the efficiency of Direct Multi-Horizon Forecasting. A new training scheme, forking-sequences, is designed for sequential

Bayesian optimization has been successfully used to optimize complex black-box functions whose evaluations are expensive. In many applications, like in deep learning and predictive analytics, the optimization domain is itself complex and structured. In this work, we focus on use cases where this domain exhibits a known dependency structure. The benefit of leveraging this structure is twofold: we explore

Bayesian optimization (BO) has emerged during the last few years as an effective approach to optimizing black-box functions where direct queries of the objective are expensive. In this paper we consider the case where direct access to the function is not possible, but information about user preferences is. Such scenarios arise in problems where human preferences are modeled, such as A/B tests or recommender

We consider real world task-oriented dialog settings, where agents need to generate both fluent natural language responses and correct external actions like database queries and updates. We demonstrate that, when applied to customer support chat transcripts, Sequence to Sequence (Seq2Seq) models often generate short, incoherent and ungrammatical natural language responses that are dominated by words that

Conversational agents are exploding in popularity. However, much work remains in the area of non goal-oriented conversations, despite significant growth in research interest over recent years. To advance the state of the art in conversational AI, Amazon launched the Alexa Prize, a 2.5-million dollar university competition where sixteen selected university teams built conversational agents to deliver the

Supplementing log filter-bank energies with i-vectors is a popular method for adaptive training of deep neural network acoustic models. While offline i-vectors (the target utterance or other relevant adaptation material is available for i-vector extraction prior to decoding) have been well studied, there is little analysis of online i-vectors and their robustness in multi-user scenarios where speaker changes