Natural Language Processing for Conversational AI

A special issue of Information (ISSN 2078-2489). This special issue belongs to the section "Artificial Intelligence".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 April 2022) | Viewed by 4924

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA
Interests: conversational AI; dialogue management; social interactions; reinforcement learning

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Guest Editor
Computer Science, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90007, USA
Interests: dialogue systems; artificial intelligence, machine learning, reinforcement learning

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Guest Editor
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA
Interests: natural language understanding; spoken dialog systems

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Guest Editor
Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Taiwan University, Taipei 10617, Taiwan
Interests: dialogue systems; language understanding; dialogue modeling

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Conversational AI has seen great progress in recent years, but many challenges still remain to be solved. The more we try to model human–human interaction, the more we realize that conversational AI is an interdisciplinary subject, involving fields that range from machine learning to psychology and sociology.

Many initiatives to advance the state of the art were started in different research communities, including the Dialogue State Tracking Challenges (that transformed into the Dialogue Systems Technology Challenges), the NeurIPS Conversational Intelligence Challenge live competition, and the Amazon Alexa prize competition. However, various fields within the NLP community, such as semantic parsing, coreference resolution, sentiment analysis, question answering, or machine reading comprehension, among others, have seldom been evaluated or applied in the context of conversational AI.

This special session aims to bring together NLP researchers and practitioners from different fields, alongside experts in speech and machine learning, to advance the current state-of-the-art, share insights and challenges, and bridge the gap between academic research and real-world product deployment.

Topics of interest include:

  • Language Understanding (NLU/SLU)
  • Language Generation
  • Dialogue State Tracking
  • Policy Optimization (Supervised/Reinforced)
  • Dialogue Evaluation
  • Dialogue Data Collection/Datasets
  • End-to-End Dialogue Modeling
  • Multimodal Dialogue
  • Discourse Modeling
  • Coreference Resolution
  • Dialogue Representation Learning
  • Conversational AI Deployment
  • User Modeling
  • Learning from User Feedback
  • Human-in-the-loop Dialogue

Dr. Alexandros Papangelis
Dr. Elnaz Nouri
Dr. Bing Liu
Dr. Yun-Nung (Vivian) Chen
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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Keywords

  • natural language processing
  • conversational AI
  • spoken dialogue systems
  • human–computer interaction

Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

17 pages, 935 KiB  
Article
State-of-the-Art in Open-Domain Conversational AI: A Survey
by Tosin Adewumi, Foteini Liwicki and Marcus Liwicki
Information 2022, 13(6), 298; https://doi.org/10.3390/info13060298 - 10 Jun 2022
Cited by 9 | Viewed by 3386
Abstract
We survey SoTA open-domain conversational AI models with the objective of presenting the prevailing challenges that still exist to spur future research. In addition, we provide statistics on the gender of conversational AI in order to guide the ethics discussion surrounding the issue. [...] Read more.
We survey SoTA open-domain conversational AI models with the objective of presenting the prevailing challenges that still exist to spur future research. In addition, we provide statistics on the gender of conversational AI in order to guide the ethics discussion surrounding the issue. Open-domain conversational AI models are known to have several challenges, including bland, repetitive responses and performance degradation when prompted with figurative language, among others. First, we provide some background by discussing some topics of interest in conversational AI. We then discuss the method applied to the two investigations carried out that make up this study. The first investigation involves a search for recent SoTA open-domain conversational AI models, while the second involves the search for 100 conversational AI to assess their gender. Results of the survey show that progress has been made with recent SoTA conversational AI, but there are still persistent challenges that need to be solved, and the female gender is more common than the male for conversational AI. One main takeaway is that hybrid models of conversational AI offer more advantages than any single architecture. The key contributions of this survey are (1) the identification of prevailing challenges in SoTA open-domain conversational AI, (2) the rarely held discussion on open-domain conversational AI for low-resource languages, and (3) the discussion about the ethics surrounding the gender of conversational AI. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Natural Language Processing for Conversational AI)
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