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Traditional systems designed for task oriented dialog utilize knowledge present only in structured knowledge sources to generate responses. However, relevant information required to generate responses may also reside in unstructured…

The language used by physicians and health professionals in prescription directions includes medical jargon and implicit directives and causes much confusion among patients. Human intervention to simplify the language at the pharmacies may…

One of the challenges in a task oriented natural language application like the Google Assistant, Siri, or Alexa is to localize the output to many languages. This paper explores doing this by applying machine translation to the English…

Modern virtual personal assistants provide a convenient interface for completing daily tasks via voice commands. An important consideration for these assistants is the ability to recover from automatic speech recognition (ASR) and natural…

The rise of personal assistants has made conversational question answering (ConvQA) a very popular mechanism for user-system interaction. State-of-the-art methods for ConvQA over knowledge graphs (KGs) can only learn from crisp…

Questions asked by humans during a conversation often contain contextual dependencies, i.e., explicit or implicit references to previous dialogue turns. These dependencies take the form of coreferences (e.g., via pronoun use) or ellipses,…

Previous studies have shown that health reports in social media, such as DailyStrength and Twitter, have potential for monitoring health conditions (e.g. adverse drug reactions, infectious diseases) in particular communities. However, in…

Speech-based image retrieval has been studied as a proxy for joint representation learning, usually without emphasis on retrieval itself. As such, it is unclear how well speech-based retrieval can work in practice -- both in an absolute…

Parameter-efficient methods are able to use a single frozen pre-trained large language model (LLM) to perform many tasks by learning task-specific soft prompts that modulate model behavior when concatenated to the input text. However, these…

In this paper, we study the problem of employing pre-trained language models for multi-turn response selection in retrieval-based chatbots. A new model, named Speaker-Aware BERT (SA-BERT), is proposed in order to make the model aware of the…

Slot-filling and intent detection are the backbone of conversational agents such as voice assistants, and are active areas of research. Even though state-of-the-art techniques on publicly available benchmarks show impressive performance,…

Some robots can interact with humans using natural language, and identify service requests through human-robot dialog. However, few robots are able to improve their language capabilities from this experience. In this paper, we develop a…

As one promising way to inquire about any particular information through a dialog with the bot, question answering dialog systems have gained increasing research interests recently. Designing interactive QA systems has always been a…

Recent research has shown that large language models pretrained using unsupervised approaches can achieve significant performance improvement on many downstream tasks. Typically when adapting these language models to downstream tasks, like…

Personalized conversation models (PCMs) generate responses according to speaker preferences. Existing personalized conversation tasks typically require models to extract speaker preferences from user descriptions or their conversation…

For effective human-robot interaction, it is important that a robotic assistant can forecast the next action a human will consider in a given task. Unfortunately, real-world tasks are often very long, complex, and repetitive; as a result…

Large pre-trained language models help to achieve state of the art on a variety of natural language processing (NLP) tasks, nevertheless, they still suffer from forgetting when incrementally learning a sequence of tasks. To alleviate this…

Non-autoregressive neural machine translation (NAT) generates each target word in parallel and has achieved promising inference acceleration. However, existing NAT models still have a big gap in translation quality compared to…

The Rational Speech Acts (RSA) model treats language use as a recursive process in which probabilistic speaker and listener agents reason about each other's intentions to enrich the literal semantics of their language along broadly Gricean…

Large language models have shown impressive few-shot results on a wide range of tasks. However, when knowledge is key for such results, as is the case for tasks such as question answering and fact checking, massive parameter counts to store…