Evaluation is a crucial part of the dialog system development process. Human judgment is considered a gold standard for the evaluation of dialog agents. However, this is also a very expensive and time-intensive approach. Thus, researchers mostly rely on automatic metrics when developing dialog systems. In this article, we’ll introduce a brief overview of the key evaluation … [Read more...] about Evaluation Metrics For Dialog Systems
Research
Key Dialog Datasets: Overview and Critique
To build a state-of-the-art dialog system, you need challenging tasks for model training and evaluation. There are numerous dialog datasets that assist researchers in building task-oriented and chit-chat dialog agents. In particular, the Facebook Research team has introduced a framework, called ParlAI (pronounced par-lay), where they’ve gathered together 80+ popular dialog … [Read more...] about Key Dialog Datasets: Overview and Critique
Task-Oriented Dialog Agents: Recent Advances and Challenges
Hotel bookings, weather queries, restaurant reservations – chatbots and virtual assistants seem to be the perfect solution for these kinds of routine inquiries. Not surprisingly, task-oriented dialog systems that support these chatbots have become a hot topic in the AI and NLP research community. In this article, we will review the recent research breakthroughs in … [Read more...] about Task-Oriented Dialog Agents: Recent Advances and Challenges
The Latest Breakthroughs in Conversational AI Agents
2020 is the breakthrough year for conversational agents. First, Google’s chatbot Meena and Facebook’s chatbot Blender demonstrated that dialog agents can achieve close to human-level performance in certain tasks. Then, OpenAI’s GPT-3 model made lots of people wonder whether Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is already here. While we are still a long way off true AGI, … [Read more...] about The Latest Breakthroughs in Conversational AI Agents
ECCV 2020: Some Highlights
The 2020 European Conference on Computer Vision took place online, from 23 to 28 August, and consisted of 1360 papers, divided into 104 orals, 160 spotlights and the rest of 1096 papers as posters. In addition to 45 workshops and 16 tutorials. As it is the case in recent years with ML and CV conferences, the huge number of papers can be overwhelming at times. Similar to … [Read more...] about ECCV 2020: Some Highlights
3 NLP Interpretability Tools For Debugging Language Models
With constant advances and unprecedented performance on many NLP tasks, language models have gotten really complex and hard to debug. Researchers and engineers often can’t easily answer questions like: Why did your model make that prediction? Does your model have any algorithmic biases? What kind of data samples does your model perform poorly … [Read more...] about 3 NLP Interpretability Tools For Debugging Language Models
Best Research Papers From ICML 2020
This year’s virtual ICML conference hosted 10800+ attendees from 75 countries. Apparently, the virtual format makes big research conferences such as ICML more accessible to the AI community all over the world. With almost 5000 research papers submitted to ICML 2020 and an acceptance rate of 21.8%, a total of 1088 papers were presented at the conference. As usual, the … [Read more...] about Best Research Papers From ICML 2020
Highlights of ACL 2020
ACL Trends Visualization by Wanxiang Che With ACL becoming virtual this year, I unfortunately spent less time networking and catching up with colleagues, but as a silver lining I watched many more talks than I usually do. I decided to share the notes I took and discuss some overall trends. The list is not exhaustive, and is based on my research interests. I recommend also … [Read more...] about Highlights of ACL 2020
Best Research Papers From ACL 2020
ACL is the leading conference in the field of natural language processing (NLP), covering a broad spectrum of research areas in computational linguistics. Due to the COVID-19 risks, ACL 2020 took place 100% virtually, similar to other big academic conferences of this year. However, as always, it was the best place to learn about the latest NLP research trends and … [Read more...] about Best Research Papers From ACL 2020
Reformer, Longformer, and ELECTRA: Key Updates To Transformer Architecture In 2020
The leading pre-trained language models demonstrate remarkable performance on different NLP tasks, making them a much-welcomed tool for a number of applications, including sentiment analysis, chatbots, text summarization, and so on. However, good performance usually comes at the cost of enormous computational resources that are not accessible by most researchers and business … [Read more...] about Reformer, Longformer, and ELECTRA: Key Updates To Transformer Architecture In 2020