Reinforcement Learning for Adaptive Dialogue Systems

by Verena Rieser
Reinforcement Learning for Adaptive Dialogue Systems
Author: Verena Rieser
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 261
Release: 2011-11-23
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 3642249426
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The past decade has seen a revolution in the field of spoken dialogue systems. As in other areas of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, data-driven methods are now being used to drive new methodologies for system development and evaluation. This book is a unique contribution to that ongoing change. A new methodology for developing spoken dialogue systems is described in detail. The journey starts and ends with human behaviour in interaction, and explores methods for learning from the data, for building simulation environments for training and testing systems, and for evaluating the results. The detailed material covers: Spoken and Multimodal dialogue systems, Wizard-of-Oz data collection, User Simulation methods, Reinforcement Learning, and Evaluation methodologies. The book is a research guide for students and researchers with a background in Computer Science, AI, or Machine Learning. It navigates through a detailed case study in data-driven methods for development and evaluation of spoken dialogue systems. Common challenges associated with this approach are discussed and example solutions are provided. This work provides insights, lessons, and inspiration for future research and development – not only for spoken dialogue systems in particular, but for data-driven approaches to human-machine interaction in general.

Data-Driven Methods for Adaptive Spoken Dialogue Systems

by Oliver Lemon
Data-Driven Methods for Adaptive Spoken Dialogue Systems
Author: Oliver Lemon
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 184
Release: 2012-10-21
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 1461448026
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Data driven methods have long been used in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Text-To-Speech (TTS) synthesis and have more recently been introduced for dialogue management, spoken language understanding, and Natural Language Generation. Machine learning is now present “end-to-end” in Spoken Dialogue Systems (SDS). However, these techniques require data collection and annotation campaigns, which can be time-consuming and expensive, as well as dataset expansion by simulation. In this book, we provide an overview of the current state of the field and of recent advances, with a specific focus on adaptivity.

Empirical Methods in Natural Language Generation

by Emiel Krahmer
Empirical Methods in Natural Language Generation
Author: Emiel Krahmer
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 363
Release: 2010-09-09
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 3642155723
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Natural language generation (NLG) is a subfield of natural language processing (NLP) that is often characterized as the study of automatically converting non-linguistic representations (e.g., from databases or other knowledge sources) into coherent natural language text. In recent years the field has evolved substantially. Perhaps the most important new development is the current emphasis on data-oriented methods and empirical evaluation. Progress in related areas such as machine translation, dialogue system design and automatic text summarization and the resulting awareness of the importance of language generation, the increasing availability of suitable corpora in recent years, and the organization of shared tasks for NLG, where different teams of researchers develop and evaluate their algorithms on a shared, held out data set have had a considerable impact on the field, and this book offers the first comprehensive overview of recent empirically oriented NLG research.

Spoken Dialogue Systems

by Kristina Jokinen
Spoken Dialogue Systems
Author: Kristina Jokinen
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 151
Release: 2022-05-31
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 3031021347
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Considerable progress has been made in recent years in the development of dialogue systems that support robust and efficient human-machine interaction using spoken language. Spoken dialogue technology allows various interactive applications to be built and used for practical purposes, and research focuses on issues that aim to increase the system's communicative competence by including aspects of error correction, cooperation, multimodality, and adaptation in context. This book gives a comprehensive view of state-of-the-art techniques that are used to build spoken dialogue systems. It provides an overview of the basic issues such as system architectures, various dialogue management methods, system evaluation, and also surveys advanced topics concerning extensions of the basic model to more conversational setups. The goal of the book is to provide an introduction to the methods, problems, and solutions that are used in dialogue system development and evaluation. It presents dialogue modelling and system development issues relevant in both academic and industrial environments and also discusses requirements and challenges for advanced interaction management and future research. Table of Contents: Preface / Introduction to Spoken Dialogue Systems / Dialogue Management / Error Handling / Case Studies: Advanced Approaches to Dialogue Management / Advanced Issues / Methodologies and Practices of Evaluation / Future Directions / References / Author Biographies

Algorithms for Reinforcement Learning

by Csaba Szepesvari
Algorithms for Reinforcement Learning
Author: Csaba Szepesvari
Publisher: Morgan & Claypool Publishers
Total Pages: 89
Release: 2010
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 1608454924
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Reinforcement learning is a learning paradigm concerned with learning to control a system so as to maximize a numerical performance measure that expresses a long-term objective. What distinguishes reinforcement learning from supervised learning is that only partial feedback is given to the learner about the learner's predictions. Further, the predictions may have long term effects through influencing the future state of the controlled system. Thus, time plays a special role. The goal in reinforcement learning is to develop efficient learning algorithms, as well as to understand the algorithms' merits and limitations. Reinforcement learning is of great interest because of the large number of practical applications that it can be used to address, ranging from problems in artificial intelligence to operations research or control engineering. In this book, we focus on those algorithms of reinforcement learning that build on the powerful theory of dynamic programming.We give a fairly comprehensive catalog of learning problems, describe the core ideas, note a large number of state of the art algorithms, followed by the discussion of their theoretical properties and limitations.

Building Dialogue POMDPs from Expert Dialogues

by Hamidreza Chinaei
Building Dialogue POMDPs from Expert Dialogues
Author: Hamidreza Chinaei
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 123
Release: 2016-02-08
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 3319262009
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This book discusses the Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) framework applied in dialogue systems. It presents POMDP as a formal framework to represent uncertainty explicitly while supporting automated policy solving. The authors propose and implement an end-to-end learning approach for dialogue POMDP model components. Starting from scratch, they present the state, the transition model, the observation model and then finally the reward model from unannotated and noisy dialogues. These altogether form a significant set of contributions that can potentially inspire substantial further work. This concise manuscript is written in a simple language, full of illustrative examples, figures, and tables.

Spoken Dialogue Systems for Ambient Environments

by Gary Geunbae Lee
Spoken Dialogue Systems for Ambient Environments
Author: Gary Geunbae Lee
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2010-09-27
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 3642162010
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This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Spoken Dialogue Systems, IWDS 2010, held in Gotemba, Japan, in October 2010. The 22 session papers presented together with 2 invited keynote talks were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers deal with topics around Spoken Dialogue Systems for Ambient Environment and discuss common issues of theories, applications, evaluation, limitations, general tools and techniques.

Neural Approaches to Conversational AI: Question Answering, Task-Oriented Dialogues and Social Chatbots

by Jianfeng Gao
Neural Approaches to Conversational AI: Question Answering, Task-Oriented Dialogues and Social Chatbots
Author: Jianfeng Gao
Publisher: Foundations and Trends(r) in I
Total Pages: 184
Release: 2019-02-21
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 9781680835526
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This monograph is the first survey of neural approaches to conversational AI that targets Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval audiences. It provides a comprehensive survey of the neural approaches to conversational AI that have been developed in the last few years, covering QA, task-oriented and social bots with a unified view of optimal decision making.The authors draw connections between modern neural approaches and traditional approaches, allowing readers to better understand why and how the research has evolved and to shed light on how they can move forward. They also present state-of-the-art approaches to training dialogue agents using both supervised and reinforcement learning. Finally, the authors sketch out the landscape of conversational systems developed in the research community and released in industry, demonstrating via case studies the progress that has been made and the challenges that are still being faced.Neural Approaches to Conversational AI is a valuable resource for students, researchers, and software developers. It provides a unified view, as well as a detailed presentation of the important ideas and insights needed to understand and create modern dialogue agents that will be instrumental to making world knowledge and services accessible to millions of users in ways that seem natural and intuitive.

Neural Information Processing

by Long Cheng
Neural Information Processing
Author: Long Cheng
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 703
Release: 2018-12-03
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 3030041824
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The seven-volume set of LNCS 11301-11307, constitutes the proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Neural Information Processing, ICONIP 2018, held in Siem Reap, Cambodia, in December 2018. The 401 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 575 submissions. The papers address the emerging topics of theoretical research, empirical studies, and applications of neural information processing techniques across different domains. The third volume, LNCS 11303, is organized in topical sections on embedded learning, transfer learning, reinforcement learning, and other learning approaches.