The advances in language-based Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies applied to build educational applications can present AI for social-good opportunities with a broader positive impact. Across many disciplines, enhancing the quality of mathematics education is crucial in building critical thinking and problem-solving skills at younger ages. Conversational AI systems have started maturing to a point where they could play a significant role in helping students learn fundamental math concepts. This work presents a task-oriented Spoken Dialogue System (SDS) built to support play-based learning of basic math concepts for early childhood education. The system has been evaluated via real-world deployments at school while the students are practicing early math concepts with multimodal interactions. We discuss our efforts to improve the SDS pipeline built for math learning, for which we explore utilizing MathBERT representations for potential enhancement to the Natural Language Understanding (NLU) module. We perform an end-to-end evaluation using real-world deployment outputs from the Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Intent Recognition, and Dialogue Manager (DM) components to understand how error propagation affects the overall performance in real-world scenarios.

In this paper, we perform an exhaustive evaluation of different representations to address the intent classification problem in a Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) setup. We benchmark three types of systems to perform the SLU intent detection task: 1) text-based, 2) lattice-based, and a novel 3) multimodal approach. Our work provides a comprehensive analysis of what could be the achievable performance of different state-of-the-art SLU systems under different circumstances, e.g., automatically- vs. manually-generated transcripts. We evaluate the systems on the publicly available SLURP spoken language resource corpus. Our results indicate that using richer forms of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) outputs allows SLU systems to improve in comparison to the 1-best setup (4% relative improvement). However, crossmodal approaches, i.e., learning from acoustic and text embeddings, obtains performance similar to the oracle setup, and a relative improvement of 18% over the 1-best configuration. Thus, crossmodal architectures represent a good alternative to overcome the limitations of working purely automatically generated textual data.

Any organization needs to improve their products, services, and processes. In this context, engaging with customers and understanding their journey is essential. Organizations have leveraged various techniques and technologies to support customer engagement, from call centres to chatbots and virtual agents. Recently, these systems have used Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to analyze large volumes of customer feedback and engagement data. The goal is to understand customers in context and provide meaningful answers across various channels. Despite multiple advances in Conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Recommender Systems (RS), it is still challenging to understand the intent behind customer questions during the customer journey. To address this challenge, in this paper, we study and analyze the recent work in Conversational Recommender Systems (CRS) in general and, more specifically, in chatbot-based CRS. We introduce a pipeline to contextualize the input utterances in conversations. We then take the next step towards leveraging reverse feature engineering to link the contextualized input and learning model to support intent recognition. Since performance evaluation is achieved based on different ML models, we use transformer base models to evaluate the proposed approach using a labelled dialogue dataset (MSDialogue) of question-answering interactions between information seekers and answer providers.

在与用户进行交流时，以任务为导向的对话系统必须根据对话历史记录在每个回合时跟踪用户的需求。这个称为对话状态跟踪（DST）的过程至关重要，因为它直接告知下游对话政策。近年来，DST引起了很大的兴趣，文本到文本范式作为受欢迎的方法。在本评论论文中，我们首先介绍任务及其相关的数据集。然后，考虑到最近出版的大量出版物，我们确定了2021 - 2022年研究的重点和研究进展。尽管神经方法已经取得了重大进展，但我们认为对话系统（例如概括性）的某些关键方面仍未得到充实。为了激励未来的研究，我们提出了几种研究途径。

当在现实世界中以任务为导向的对话系统中实现自然语言（NLG）组件时，不仅需要在训练数据上学习的自然话语，而且还需要适应对话环境（例如，环境中的噪音）听起来）和用户（例如，理解能力水平较低的用户）。受到语言生成任务的强化学习（RL）的最新进展的启发，我们提出了Antor，这是一种通过强化学习来适应以任务为导向对话的自然语言生成的方法。在Antor中，与用户对系统话语的理解相对应的自然语言理解（NLU）模块已纳入RL的目标函数中。如果将NLG的意图正确传达给了NLU，该意图理解了系统的话语，则NLG将获得积极的回报。我们在Multiwoz数据集上进行了实验，并确认Antor可以对语音识别错误和用户的不同词汇水平产生适应性话语。

口语理解（SLU）是大多数人机相互作用系统中的核心任务。随着智能家居，智能手机和智能扬声器的出现，SLU已成为该行业的关键技术。在经典的SLU方法中，自动语音识别（ASR）模块将语音信号转录为文本表示，自然语言理解（NLU）模块从中提取语义信息。最近，基于深神经网络的端到端SLU（E2E SLU）已经获得了动力，因为它受益于ASR和NLU部分的联合优化，因此限制了管道架构的误差效应的级联反应。但是，对于E2E模型用于预测语音输入的概念和意图的实际语言特性知之甚少。在本文中，我们提出了一项研究，以确定E2E模型执行SLU任务的信号特征和其他语言特性。该研究是在必须处理非英语（此处法语）语音命令的智能房屋的应用领域进行的。结果表明，良好的E2E SLU性能并不总是需要完美的ASR功能。此外，结果表明，与管道模型相比，E2E模型在处理背景噪声和句法变化方面具有出色的功能。最后，更细粒度的分析表明，E2E模型使用输入信号的音调信息来识别语音命令概念。本文概述的结果和方法提供了一个跳板，以进一步分析语音处理中的E2E模型。

The goal of building dialogue agents that can converse with humans naturally has been a long-standing dream of researchers since the early days of artificial intelligence. The well-known Turing Test proposed to judge the ultimate validity of an artificial intelligence agent on the indistinguishability of its dialogues from humans'. It should come as no surprise that human-level dialogue systems are very challenging to build. But, while early effort on rule-based systems found limited success, the emergence of deep learning enabled great advance on this topic. In this thesis, we focus on methods that address the numerous issues that have been imposing the gap between artificial conversational agents and human-level interlocutors. These methods were proposed and experimented with in ways that were inspired by general state-of-the-art AI methodologies. But they also targeted the characteristics that dialogue systems possess.

Empathy is a vital factor that contributes to mutual understanding, and joint problem-solving. In recent years, a growing number of studies have recognized the benefits of empathy and started to incorporate empathy in conversational systems. We refer to this topic as empathetic conversational systems. To identify the critical gaps and future opportunities in this topic, this paper examines this rapidly growing field using five review dimensions: (i) conceptual empathy models and frameworks, (ii) adopted empathy-related concepts, (iii) datasets and algorithmic techniques developed, (iv) evaluation strategies, and (v) state-of-the-art approaches. The findings show that most studies have centered on the use of the EMPATHETICDIALOGUES dataset, and the text-based modality dominates research in this field. Studies mainly focused on extracting features from the messages of the users and the conversational systems, with minimal emphasis on user modeling and profiling. Notably, studies that have incorporated emotion causes, external knowledge, and affect matching in the response generation models, have obtained significantly better results. For implementation in diverse real-world settings, we recommend that future studies should address key gaps in areas of detecting and authenticating emotions at the entity level, handling multimodal inputs, displaying more nuanced empathetic behaviors, and encompassing additional dialogue system features.

随着自动语音处理（ASR）系统越来越好，使用ASR输出越来越令于进行下游自然语言处理（NLP）任务。但是，很少的开源工具包可用于在不同口语理解（SLU）基准上生成可重复的结果。因此，需要建立一个开源标准，可以用于具有更快的开始进入SLU研究。我们展示了Espnet-SLU，它旨在在一个框架中快速发展口语语言理解。 Espnet-SLU是一个项目内部到结束语音处理工具包，ESPNET，它是一个广泛使用的开源标准，用于各种语音处理任务，如ASR，文本到语音（TTS）和语音转换（ST）。我们增强了工具包，为各种SLU基准提供实现，使研究人员能够无缝混合和匹配不同的ASR和NLU模型。我们还提供预磨损的模型，具有集中调谐的超参数，可以匹配或甚至优于最新的最先进的性能。该工具包在https://github.com/espnet/espnet上公开提供。

This paper aims to provide a radical rundown on Conversation Search (ConvSearch), an approach to enhance the information retrieval method where users engage in a dialogue for the information-seeking tasks. In this survey, we predominantly focused on the human interactive characteristics of the ConvSearch systems, highlighting the operations of the action modules, likely the Retrieval system, Question-Answering, and Recommender system. We labeled various ConvSearch research problems in knowledge bases, natural language processing, and dialogue management systems along with the action modules. We further categorized the framework to ConvSearch and the application is directed toward biomedical and healthcare fields for the utilization of clinical social technology. Finally, we conclude by talking through the challenges and issues of ConvSearch, particularly in Bio-Medicine. Our main aim is to provide an integrated and unified vision of the ConvSearch components from different fields, which benefit the information-seeking process in healthcare systems.

自从引进原始伯特（即，基础BERT）以来，研究人员通过利用转让学习的好处，开发了各种定制的伯特模型，并通过利用转移学习的好处来提高特定领域和任务的性能。由于数学文本的性质，这通常使用域特定的词汇以及方程和数学符号，我们对数学的新BERT模型的开发对于许多数学下游任务有用。在这个资源论文中，我们介绍了我们的多体制努力（即，美国的两个学习平台和三个学术机构）对此需求：Mathbert，通过在大型数学语料库上预先培训基础伯爵模型来创建的模型预先幼儿园（Pre-K），高中，大学毕业生水平数学内容。此外，我们选择了三个通常用于数学教育的一般NLP任务：知识组件预测，自动分级开放式Q＆A，以及知识追踪，以展示Mathbert对底座的优越性。我们的实验表明，Mathbert以此任务的2-8％达到了1.2-22％，碱基贝尔以前最佳方法。此外，我们建立了一个数学特定的词汇“Mathvocab”，用Mathbert训练。我们发现Mathbert预先接受过的“Mathvocab”优于Mathbert培训的底座伯特词汇（即'Origvocab'）。 Mathbert目前正在参加倾斜平台采用：Stride，Inc，商业教育资源提供商和Accortments.org，是一个免费在线教育平台。我们发布Mathbert以获取公共用途：https://github.com/tbs17/mathbert。

Spoken language understanding (SLU) tasks have been studied for many decades in the speech research community, but have not received as much attention as lower-level tasks like speech and speaker recognition. In particular, there are not nearly as many SLU task benchmarks, and many of the existing ones use data that is not freely available to all researchers. Recent work has begun to introduce such benchmark datasets for several tasks. In this work, we introduce several new annotated SLU benchmark tasks based on freely available speech data, which complement existing benchmarks and address gaps in the SLU evaluation landscape. We contribute four tasks: question answering and summarization involve inference over longer speech sequences; named entity localization addresses the speech-specific task of locating the targeted content in the signal; dialog act classification identifies the function of a given speech utterance. We follow the blueprint of the Spoken Language Understanding Evaluation (SLUE) benchmark suite. In order to facilitate the development of SLU models that leverage the success of pre-trained speech representations, we will be publishing for each task (i) annotations for a relatively small fine-tuning set, (ii) annotated development and test sets, and (iii) baseline models for easy reproducibility and comparisons. In this work, we present the details of data collection and annotation and the performance of the baseline models. We also perform sensitivity analysis of pipeline models' performance (speech recognizer + text model) to the speech recognition accuracy, using more than 20 state-of-the-art speech recognition models.

Natural Language Generation (NLG) has improved exponentially in recent years thanks to the development of sequence-to-sequence deep learning technologies such as Transformer-based language models. This advancement has led to more fluent and coherent NLG, leading to improved development in downstream tasks such as abstractive summarization, dialogue generation and data-to-text generation. However, it is also apparent that deep learning based generation is prone to hallucinate unintended text, which degrades the system performance and fails to meet user expectations in many real-world scenarios. To address this issue, many studies have been presented in measuring and mitigating hallucinated texts, but these have never been reviewed in a comprehensive manner before. In this survey, we thus provide a broad overview of the research progress and challenges in the hallucination problem in NLG. The survey is organized into two parts: (1) a general overview of metrics, mitigation methods, and future directions; and (2) an overview of task-specific research progress on hallucinations in the following downstream tasks, namely abstractive summarization, dialogue generation, generative question answering, data-to-text generation, machine translation, and visual-language generation. This survey serves to facilitate collaborative efforts among researchers in tackling the challenge of hallucinated texts in NLG.

Personal assistants, automatic speech recognizers and dialogue understanding systems are becoming more critical in our interconnected digital world. A clear example is air traffic control (ATC) communications. ATC aims at guiding aircraft and controlling the airspace in a safe and optimal manner. These voice-based dialogues are carried between an air traffic controller (ATCO) and pilots via very-high frequency radio channels. In order to incorporate these novel technologies into ATC (low-resource domain), large-scale annotated datasets are required to develop the data-driven AI systems. Two examples are automatic speech recognition (ASR) and natural language understanding (NLU). In this paper, we introduce the ATCO2 corpus, a dataset that aims at fostering research on the challenging ATC field, which has lagged behind due to lack of annotated data. The ATCO2 corpus covers 1) data collection and pre-processing, 2) pseudo-annotations of speech data, and 3) extraction of ATC-related named entities. The ATCO2 corpus is split into three subsets. 1) ATCO2-test-set corpus contains 4 hours of ATC speech with manual transcripts and a subset with gold annotations for named-entity recognition (callsign, command, value). 2) The ATCO2-PL-set corpus consists of 5281 hours of unlabeled ATC data enriched with automatic transcripts from an in-domain speech recognizer, contextual information, speaker turn information, signal-to-noise ratio estimate and English language detection score per sample. Both available for purchase through ELDA at http://catalog.elra.info/en-us/repository/browse/ELRA-S0484. 3) The ATCO2-test-set-1h corpus is a one-hour subset from the original test set corpus, that we are offering for free at https://www.atco2.org/data. We expect the ATCO2 corpus will foster research on robust ASR and NLU not only in the field of ATC communications but also in the general research community.

Even though machine learning has become the major scene in dialogue research community, the real breakthrough has been blocked by the scale of data available. To address this fundamental obstacle, we introduce the Multi-Domain Wizard-of-Oz dataset (MultiWOZ), a fully-labeled collection of human-human written conversations spanning over multiple domains and topics. At a size of 10k dialogues, it is at least one order of magnitude larger than all previous annotated task-oriented corpora. The contribution of this work apart from the open-sourced dataset labelled with dialogue belief states and dialogue actions is two-fold: firstly, a detailed description of the data collection procedure along with a summary of data structure and analysis is provided. The proposed data-collection pipeline is entirely based on crowd-sourcing without the need of hiring professional annotators; secondly, a set of benchmark results of belief tracking, dialogue act and response generation is reported, which shows the usability of the data and sets a baseline for future studies.

We are currently unable to specify human goals and societal values in a way that reliably directs AI behavior. Law-making and legal interpretation form a computational engine that converts opaque human values into legible directives. "Law Informs Code" is the research agenda capturing complex computational legal processes, and embedding them in AI. Similar to how parties to a legal contract cannot foresee every potential contingency of their future relationship, and legislators cannot predict all the circumstances under which their proposed bills will be applied, we cannot ex ante specify rules that provably direct good AI behavior. Legal theory and practice have developed arrays of tools to address these specification problems. For instance, legal standards allow humans to develop shared understandings and adapt them to novel situations. In contrast to more prosaic uses of the law (e.g., as a deterrent of bad behavior through the threat of sanction), leveraged as an expression of how humans communicate their goals, and what society values, Law Informs Code. We describe how data generated by legal processes (methods of law-making, statutory interpretation, contract drafting, applications of legal standards, legal reasoning, etc.) can facilitate the robust specification of inherently vague human goals. This increases human-AI alignment and the local usefulness of AI. Toward society-AI alignment, we present a framework for understanding law as the applied philosophy of multi-agent alignment. Although law is partly a reflection of historically contingent political power - and thus not a perfect aggregation of citizen preferences - if properly parsed, its distillation offers the most legitimate computational comprehension of societal values available. If law eventually informs powerful AI, engaging in the deliberative political process to improve law takes on even more meaning.

语言基础的挑战是通过在现实世界中的引用中充分理解自然语言。尽管可以使用AI技术，但此类技术对人类机器人团队的广泛采用和有效性依赖于用户信任。这项调查提供了有关语言基础的新兴信任领域的三项贡献，包括a）根据AI技术，数据集和用户界面的语言基础研究概述；b）与语言基础有关的六个假设信任因素，这些因素在人机清洁团队经验中进行了经验测试；c）对语言基础的信任的未来研究指示。

确保适当的标点符号和字母外壳是朝向应用复杂的自然语言处理算法的关键预处理步骤。这对于缺少标点符号和壳体的文本源，例如自动语音识别系统的原始输出。此外，简短的短信和微博的平台提供不可靠且经常错误的标点符号和套管。本调查概述了历史和最先进的技术，用于恢复标点符号和纠正单词套管。此外，突出了当前的挑战和研究方向。

As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes a prominent part of modern life, AI literacy is becoming important for all citizens, not just those in technology careers. Previous research in AI education materials has largely focused on the introduction of terminology as well as AI use cases and ethics, but few allow students to learn by creating their own machine learning models. Therefore, there is a need for enriching AI educational tools with more adaptable and flexible platforms for interested educators with any level of technical experience to utilize within their teaching material. As such, we propose the development of an open-source tool (Build-a-Bot) for students and teachers to not only create their own transformer-based chatbots based on their own course material, but also learn the fundamentals of AI through the model creation process. The primary concern of this paper is the creation of an interface for students to learn the principles of artificial intelligence by using a natural language pipeline to train a customized model to answer questions based on their own school curriculums. The model uses contexts given by their instructor, such as chapters of a textbook, to answer questions and is deployed on an interactive chatbot/voice agent. The pipeline teaches students data collection, data augmentation, intent recognition, and question answering by having them work through each of these processes while creating their AI agent, diverging from previous chatbot work where students and teachers use the bots as black-boxes with no abilities for customization or the bots lack AI capabilities, with the majority of dialogue scripts being rule-based. In addition, our tool is designed to make each step of this pipeline intuitive for students at a middle-school level. Further work primarily lies in providing our tool to schools and seeking student and teacher evaluations.

我们提出了Blenderbot 3，这是一个175B参数对话模型，能够通过访问Internet和长期内存进行开放域对话，并接受了大量用户定义的任务的培训。我们同时发布了模型权重和代码，还将模型部署在公共网页上，以与有机用户进行交互。该技术报告描述了该模型的构建方式（建筑，模型和培训计划）以及其部署的细节，包括安全机制。人类评估表明，它优于现有的开放域对话代理，包括其前身（Roller等，2021； Komeili等，2022）。最后，我们使用部署收集的数据详细介绍了持续学习的计划，该数据也将公开发布。因此，该研究计划的目标是使社区能够研究通过互动学习的不断改进的负责任的代理商。