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Reasoning-based Dialog Systems - ESSLLI 2015 |
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This course is intended as a 1-week (5x90min) introductory course on dialog
systems, with a particular emphasis on symbolic systems.
Dialog or conversation is an essential feature of natural language, that
researchers have strived (with uneven success) to replicate since
the very early days of artificial intelligence
(e.g., ELIZA or SHRDLU back in the 60's and 70's). Recent advances in
natural language processing are spreading this technology far and wide
(e.g., IVR phone systems, hand-held devices' personal assistants such as
Siri or Maluuba) and transforming the way in which we interact with
machines.
The course comprises a practical component, in which we will
experiment with some known open source Java APIs for building
dialog systems.
This course will assume no prior knowledge from students
other than some basic (Java) programming skills.
Day 2. Dialog systems. We describe the main features of dialog systems, viz., their standard architectures and components (natural language understanding and generation, dialog management/planning, information states, background knowledge) and their main use cases. We will also survey some open- and closed- source APIs and toolkits currently available. We will also discuss briefly the main evaluation metrics proposed in the literature. The slides can be found here. Day 3. Pattern-based systems. This lecture is an introduction to (reactive) chatterbots based on the Artificial Intelligence Markup Language (AIML), an XML-based scripting standard for building simple dialog systems. We will also see how to add automatic speech recognition (ASR) and text-to-speech (TTS) functionality to AIML bots. The slides are here. Day 4. Information state-based systems. We will delve deeper into information state-based architectures, that leverage on planning and eventually (logical) reasoning over dialog context/background knowledge. The slides are here. Day 5. Lab session and discussion. The last session will be devoted to sum-up the discussion and to experiment further with the dialog system libraries introduced during the previous sessions. The slides can be found here. |