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In this work, we propose a novel approach for multi-modal emotion recognition from conversations using speech and text. The audio representations are learned jointly with a learnable audio front-end (LEAF) model feeding to a CNN based classifier. The text representations are derived from pre-trained bidirectional encoder representations from transformer (BERT) along with a gated recurrent network (GRU). Both the textual and audio representations are separately processed using a bidirectional GRU network with self-attention.

Despite many recent advances for the design of dialogue systems, a true bottleneck remains the acquisition of data required to train its components. Unlike many other language processing applications, dialogue systems require interactions with users, therefore it is complex to develop them with pre-recorded data. Building on previous works, on-line learning is pursued here as a most convenient way to address the issue. Data collection, annotation and use in learning algorithms are performed in a single process.

Off-the-shelf speech recognizers are error-prone in specialized domains; we aim to mitigate the impact of these errors for downstream classification tasks without in-domain speech training data, by augmenting available typewritten text training data with inferred phonetic information. We apply our method to mitigate the effects of the lack of speech training data when converting a typed chatbot to a spoken language interface.

Paper available here: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8682550

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8682538

This paper presents a new method --- adversarial advantage actor-critic (Adversarial A2C), which significantly improves the efficiency of dialogue policy learning in task-completion dialogue systems. Inspired by generative adversarial networks (GAN), we train a discriminator to differentiate responses/actions generated by dialogue agents from responses/actions by experts.

This study proposes an approach to dialog state tracking (DST) in a conversational interview coaching system. For the interview coaching task, the semantic slots, used mostly in traditional dialog systems, are difficult to define manually. This study adopts the topic profile of the response from the interviewee as the dialog state representation. In addition, as the response generally consists of several sentences, the summary vector obtained from a long short-term memory neural network (LSTM) is likely to contain noisy information from many irrelevant sentences.

This study proposes an approach to dialog state tracking (DST) in a conversational interview coaching system. For the interview coaching task, the semantic slots, used mostly in traditional dialog systems, are difficult to define manually. This study adopts the topic profile of the response from the interviewee as the dialog state representation. In addition, as the response generally consists of several sentences, the summary vector obtained from a long short-term memory neural network (LSTM) is likely to contain noisy information from many irrelevant sentences.

In this work, we investigate mapping both natural language food and quantity descriptions to matching USDA database entries. We demonstrate that a convolutional neural network (CNN) model with a softmax layer on top to directly predict the most likely database matches outperforms our previous state-of-the-art approach of learning binary classification and subsequently ranking database entries using similarity scores with the learned embeddings.