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Earlier this month, Varun Sharma and Akshit Tyagi, two master’s students from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, began summer internships at Amazon, where, like many other scientists in training, they will be working on Alexa’s spoken-language-understanding systems.

Many of today’s most useful AI systems are multilabel classifiers: they map input data into multiple categories at once. An object recognizer, for instance, might classify a given image as containing sky, sea, and boats but not desert or clouds.

Alexa’s ability to respond to customer requests is largely the result of machine learning models trained on annotated data. The models are fed sample texts such as “Play the Prince song 1999” or “Play River by Joni Mitchell”. In each text, labels are attached to particular words — SongName for “1999” and “River”, for instance, and ArtistName for Prince and Joni Mitchell. By analyzing annotated data, the system learns to classify unannotated data on its own.

As Alexa expands into new countries, she usually has to be trained on new languages. But sometimes, she has to be re-trained on languages she’s already learned. British English, American English, and Indian English, for instance, are different enough that for each of them, we trained a new machine learning model from scratch.

New approach to reference resolution rewrites queries to clarify ambiguous references.

Today, customer exchanges with Alexa are generally either one-shot requests, like “Alexa, what’s the weather?”, or interactions that require multiple requests to complete more complex tasks.

With the launch of Alexa in 2014, Amazon sparked a renaissance in conversational AI. Combining far-field speech recognition with state-of-the-art natural language understanding, Alexa captured the imagination of millions of users worldwide. All of them had discovered that speech is, indeed, the most natural of user interfaces! In the summer of 2015, the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) was launched with the goal

Inspired by studies on the overwhelming presence of experience-sharing in human- human conversations, Emora, the social chatbot developed by Emory University, aims to bring such experience-focused interaction to the current field of conver- sational AI. The traditional approach of information-sharing topic handlers is balanced with a focus on opinion-oriented exchanges that Emora delivers, and new conversational

Building conversational systems that enable natural language interactions with machines has been an attractive research area since the early days of computing, as exemplified by earlier text-based systems such as ELIZA [Weizenbaum, 1966]. The research and development work in this area has been increasing since then, with many publications on both task-oriented [Hosseini-Asl et al, 2020; Papangelis et al

We present Chirpy Cardinal, an open-domain dialogue agent, as a research plat- form for the 2019 Alexa Prize competition. Building an open-domain socialbot that talks to real people is challenging – such a system must meet multiple user expectations such as broad world knowledge, conversational style, and emotional connection. Our socialbot engages users on their terms – prioritizing their interests, feelings

The third version of the open-domain dialogue system Alquist developed within the Alexa Prize 2020 competition is designed to conduct coherent and engaging conversations on popular topics. The main novel contribution is the introduction of a system leveraging an innovative approach based on a conversational knowledge graph and adjacency pairs. The conversational knowledge graph allows the system to utilize

Gunrock 2.0 is built on top of Gunrock with an emphasis on user adaptation. Gunrock 2.0 combines various neural natural language understanding modules, including named entity detection, linking, and dialog act prediction, to improve user understanding. Its dialog management is a hierarchical model that handles various topics, such as movies, music, and sports. The system-level dialog manager can handle

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