When a human communicates with a machine using natural language on the web and online, how can it understand the human's intention and semantic context of their talk? This is an important AI task as it enables the machine to construct a sensible answer or perform a useful action for the human. Meaning is represented at the sentence level, identification of which is known as intent detection, and at the word level, a labelling task called slot filling. This dual-level joint task requires innovative thinking about natural language and deep learning network design, and as a result, many approaches and models have been proposed and applied. This tutorial will discuss how the joint task is set up and introduce Spoken Language Understanding/Natural Language Understanding (SLU/NLU) with Deep Learning techniques. We will cover the datasets, experiments and metrics used in the field. We will describe how the machine uses the latest NLP and Deep Learning techniques to address the joint task, including recurrent and attention-based Transformer networks and pre-trained models (e.g. BERT). We will then look in detail at a network that allows the two levels of the task, intent classification and slot filling, to interact to boost performance explicitly. We will do a code demonstration of a Python notebook for this model and attendees will have an opportunity to watch coding demo tasks on this joint NLU to further their understanding.

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.

了解用户的意图并从句子中识别出语义实体，即自然语言理解（NLU），是许多自然语言处理任务的上游任务。主要挑战之一是收集足够数量的注释数据来培训模型。现有有关文本增强的研究并没有充分考虑实体，因此对于NLU任务的表现不佳。为了解决这个问题，我们提出了一种新型的NLP数据增强技术，实体意识数据增强（EADA），该技术应用了树结构，实体意识到语法树（EAST），以表示句子与对实体的注意相结合。我们的EADA技术会自动从少量注释的数据中构造东方，然后生成大量的培训实例，以进行意图检测和插槽填充。四个数据集的实验结果表明，该技术在准确性和泛化能力方面显着优于现有数据增强方法。

Intent classification and slot filling are two core tasks in natural language understanding (NLU). The interaction nature of the two tasks makes the joint models often outperform the single designs. One of the promising solutions, called BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers), achieves the joint optimization of the two tasks. BERT adopts the wordpiece to tokenize each input token into multiple sub-tokens, which causes a mismatch between the tokens and the labels lengths. Previous methods utilize the hidden states corresponding to the first sub-token as input to the classifier, which limits performance improvement since some hidden semantic informations is discarded in the fine-tune process. To address this issue, we propose a novel joint model based on BERT, which explicitly models the multiple sub-tokens features after wordpiece tokenization, thereby generating the context features that contribute to slot filling. Specifically, we encode the hidden states corresponding to multiple sub-tokens into a context vector via the attention mechanism. Then, we feed each context vector into the slot filling encoder, which preserves the integrity of the sentence. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed model achieves significant improvement on intent classification accuracy, slot filling F1, and sentence-level semantic frame accuracy on two public benchmark datasets. The F1 score of the slot filling in particular has been improved from 96.1 to 98.2 (2.1% absolute) on the ATIS dataset.

与具有粗粒度信息的Crosswoz（中文）和多发性（英文）数据集相比，没有数据集，可以正确处理细粒度和分层级别信息。在本文中，我们在香港发布了一份粤语知识驱动的对话数据集（KDDRES），将多转谈话中的信息放在一个特定的餐厅。我们的语料库包含0.8k次谈话，它来自10家餐厅，提供不同地区的各种风格。除此之外，我们还设计了细粒度的插槽和意图，以更好地捕获语义信息。基准实验和数据统计分析显示了我们数据集的多样性和丰富的注释。我们认为，KDDRE的出版可以是当前对话数据集的必要补充，以及社会中小企业（中小企业）更适合和更有价值，如为每家餐馆建立定制的对话系统。语料库和基准模型是公开可用的。

Named Entity Recognition and Intent Classification are among the most important subfields of the field of Natural Language Processing. Recent research has lead to the development of faster, more sophisticated and efficient models to tackle the problems posed by those two tasks. In this work we explore the effectiveness of two separate families of Deep Learning networks for those tasks: Bidirectional Long Short-Term networks and Transformer-based networks. The models were trained and tested on the ATIS benchmark dataset for both English and Greek languages. The purpose of this paper is to present a comparative study of the two groups of networks for both languages and showcase the results of our experiments. The models, being the current state-of-the-art, yielded impressive results and achieved high performance.

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.

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.

插槽填充和意图检测是诸如语音助手的会话代理的骨干，是有效的研究领域。尽管公开的基准上的最先进的技术，但令人印象深刻的性能，他们概括到现实情景的能力尚未得到证明。在这项工作中，我们提出了一种自然，一套简单的口语导向转换，应用于数据集的评估集，在保留话语的语义时引入人类口语变化。我们将大自然应用于共同的插槽填充和意图检测基准，并证明了自然集合的标准评估的简单扰动可以显着降低模型性能。通过我们的实验，我们证明了当自然运营商应用于评估流行基准的评估集时，模型精度可以降低至多40％。

问答系统被认为是流行且经常有效的信息在网络上寻求信息的手段。在这样的系统中，寻求信息者可以通过自然语言提出问题来获得对他们的查询的简短回应。交互式问题回答是一种最近提出且日益流行的解决方案，它位于问答和对话系统的交集。一方面，用户可以以普通语言提出问题，并找到对她的询问的实际回答；另一方面，如果在初始请求中有多个可能的答复，很少或歧义，则系统可以将问题交通会话延长到对话中。通过允许用户提出更多问题，交互式问题回答使用户能够与系统动态互动并获得更精确的结果。这项调查提供了有关当前文献中普遍存在的交互式提问方法的详细概述。它首先要解释提问系统的基本原理，从而定义新的符号和分类法，以将所有已确定的作品结合在统一框架内。然后，根据提出的方法，评估方法和数据集/应用程序域来介绍和检查有关交互式问题解答系统的审查已发表的工作。我们还描述了围绕社区提出的特定任务和问题的趋势，从而阐明了学者的未来利益。 GitHub页面的综合综合了本文献研究中涵盖的所有主要主题，我们的工作得到了进一步的支持。 https://sisinflab.github.io/interactive-question-answering-systems-survey/

Text classification, a core component of task-oriented dialogue systems, attracts continuous research from both the research and industry community, and has resulted in tremendous progress. However, existing method does not consider the use of label information, which may weaken the performance of text classification systems in some token-aware scenarios. To address the problem, in this paper, we introduce the use of label information as label embedding for the task of text classification and achieve remarkable performance on benchmark dataset.

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.

Many dialogue systems (DSs) lack characteristics humans have, such as emotion perception, factuality, and informativeness. Enhancing DSs with knowledge alleviates this problem, but, as many ways of doing so exist, keeping track of all proposed methods is difficult. Here, we present the first survey of knowledge-enhanced DSs. We define three categories of systems - internal, external, and hybrid - based on the knowledge they use. We survey the motivation for enhancing DSs with knowledge, used datasets, and methods for knowledge search, knowledge encoding, and knowledge incorporation. Finally, we propose how to improve existing systems based on theories from linguistics and cognitive science.

在过去的十年中，对对话系统的兴趣已经大大增长。从扩展过程中，也有兴趣开发和改进意图分类和插槽填充模型，这是两个组件，这些组件通常在以任务为导向的对话框系统中使用。此外，良好的评估基准对于帮助比较和分析结合此类模型的系统很重要。不幸的是，该领域的许多文献仅限于对相对较少的基准数据集的分析。为了促进针对任务的对话系统的更强大的分析，我们对意图分类和插槽填充任务进行了公开可用数据集的调查。我们分类每个数据集的重要特征，并就每个数据集的适用性，优势和劣势进行讨论。我们的目标是，这项调查有助于提高这些数据集的可访问性，我们希望它们能够在未来评估意图分类和填充插槽模型中用于以任务为导向的对话框系统。

随着世界各地的更多用户正在与日常生活中的对话代理商进行互动，需要更好的言语理解，要求重新关注自动语音识别（ASR）和自然语言理解的研究之间的动态（NLU）。我们简要介绍了这些研究领域，并制定了他们之间的当前关系。鉴于我们在本文中进行的观察，我们认为（1）NLU应该认识到对话系统的管道上游使用的ASR模型的存在，（2）ASR应该能够从NLU中发现的错误（3）（3）需要对口语输入提供语义注释的端到端数据集，（4）ASR和NLU研究社区之间应该更强大的协作。

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。

讽刺可以被定义为说或写讽刺与一个人真正想表达的相反，通常是为了侮辱，刺激或娱乐某人。由于文本数据中讽刺性的性质晦涩难懂，因此检测到情感分析研究社区的困难和非常感兴趣。尽管讽刺检测的研究跨越了十多年，但最近已经取得了一些重大进步，包括在多模式环境中采用了无监督的预训练的预训练的变压器，并整合了环境以识别讽刺。在这项研究中，我们旨在简要概述英语计算讽刺研究的最新进步和趋势。我们描述了与讽刺有关的相关数据集，方法，趋势，问题，挑战和任务，这些数据集，趋势，问题，挑战和任务是无法检测到的。我们的研究提供了讽刺数据集，讽刺特征及其提取方法以及各种方法的性能分析，这些表可以帮助相关领域的研究人员了解当前的讽刺检测中最新实践。

Code-Switching, a common phenomenon in written text and conversation, has been studied over decades by the natural language processing (NLP) research community. Initially, code-switching is intensively explored by leveraging linguistic theories and, currently, more machine-learning oriented approaches to develop models. We introduce a comprehensive systematic survey on code-switching research in natural language processing to understand the progress of the past decades and conceptualize the challenges and tasks on the code-switching topic. Finally, we summarize the trends and findings and conclude with a discussion for future direction and open questions for further investigation.

发现别人认为是我们信息收集策略的关键方面。现在，人们可以积极利用信息技术来寻找和理解他人的想法，这要归功于越来越多的意见资源（例如在线评论网站和个人博客）的越来越多。由于其在理解人们的意见方面的关键功能，因此情感分析（SA）是一项至关重要的任务。另一方面，现有的研究主要集中在英语上，只有少量研究专门研究低资源语言。对于情感分析，这项工作根据用户评估提供了一个新的多级乌尔都语数据集。高音扬声器网站用于获取乌尔都语数据集。我们提出的数据集包括10,000项评论，这些评论已被人类专家精心归类为两类：正面，负面。这项研究的主要目的是构建一个手动注释的数据集进行乌尔都语情绪分析，并确定基线结果。采用了五种不同的词典和规则的算法，包括NaiveBayes，Stanza，TextBlob，Vader和Flair，实验结果表明，其精度为70％的天赋优于其他经过测试的算法。

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.