scholarly journals Conversation Graph: Data Augmentation, Training, and Evaluation for Non-Deterministic Dialogue Management

Author(s):  
Milan Gritta ◽  
Gerasimos Lampouras ◽  
Ignacio Iacobacci

Task-oriented dialogue systems typically rely on large amounts of high-quality training data or require complex handcrafted rules. However, existing datasets are often limited in size con- sidering the complexity of the dialogues. Additionally, conventional training signal in- ference is not suitable for non-deterministic agent behavior, namely, considering multiple actions as valid in identical dialogue states. We propose the Conversation Graph (ConvGraph), a graph-based representation of dialogues that can be exploited for data augmentation, multi- reference training and evaluation of non- deterministic agents. ConvGraph generates novel dialogue paths to augment data volume and diversity. Intrinsic and extrinsic evaluation across three datasets shows that data augmentation and/or multi-reference training with ConvGraph can improve dialogue success rates by up to 6.4%.

2019 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zheng Zhang ◽  
Minlie Huang ◽  
Zhongzhou Zhao ◽  
Feng Ji ◽  
Haiqing Chen ◽  
...  

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cristina Aceta ◽  
Izaskun Fernández ◽  
Aitor Soroa

Nowadays, the demand in industry of dialogue systems to be able to naturally communicate with industrial systems is increasing, as they allow to enhance productivity and security in these scenarios. However, adapting these systems to different use cases is a costly process, due to the complexity of the scenarios and the lack of available data. This work presents the Task-Oriented Dialogue management Ontology (TODO), which aims to provide a core and complete base for semantic-based task-oriented dialogue systems in the context of industrial scenarios in terms of, on the one hand, domain and dialogue modelling and, on the other hand, dialogue management and tracing support. Furthermore, its modular structure, besides grouping specific knowledge in independent components, allows to easily extend each of the modules, attending the necessities of the different use cases. These characteristics allow an easy adaptation of the ontology to different use cases, with a considerable reduction of time and costs. So as to demonstrate the capabilities of the the ontology by integrating it in a task-oriented dialogue system, TODO has been validated in real-world use cases. Finally, an evaluation is also presented, covering different relevant aspects of the ontology.


Author(s):  
Mengshi Yu ◽  
Jian Liu ◽  
Yufeng Chen ◽  
Jinan Xu ◽  
Yujie Zhang

With task-oriented dialogue systems being widely applied in everyday life, slot filling, the essential component of task-oriented dialogue systems, is required to be quickly adapted to new domains that contain domain-specific slots with few or no training data. Previous methods for slot filling usually adopt sequence labeling framework, which, however, often has limited ability when dealing with the domain-specific slots. In this paper, we take a new perspective on cross-domain slot filling by framing it as a machine reading comprehension (MRC) problem. Our approach firstly transforms slot names into well-designed queries, which contain rich informative prior knowledge and are very helpful for the detection of domain-specific slots. In addition, we utilize the large-scale MRC dataset for pre-training, which further alleviates the data scarcity problem. Experimental results on SNIPS and ATIS datasets show that our approach consistently outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods by a large margin.


2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (6) ◽  
pp. 1128 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yundong Li ◽  
Wei Hu ◽  
Han Dong ◽  
Xueyan Zhang

Using aerial cameras, satellite remote sensing or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) equipped with cameras can facilitate search and rescue tasks after disasters. The traditional manual interpretation of huge aerial images is inefficient and could be replaced by machine learning-based methods combined with image processing techniques. Given the development of machine learning, researchers find that convolutional neural networks can effectively extract features from images. Some target detection methods based on deep learning, such as the single-shot multibox detector (SSD) algorithm, can achieve better results than traditional methods. However, the impressive performance of machine learning-based methods results from the numerous labeled samples. Given the complexity of post-disaster scenarios, obtaining many samples in the aftermath of disasters is difficult. To address this issue, a damaged building assessment method using SSD with pretraining and data augmentation is proposed in the current study and highlights the following aspects. (1) Objects can be detected and classified into undamaged buildings, damaged buildings, and ruins. (2) A convolution auto-encoder (CAE) that consists of VGG16 is constructed and trained using unlabeled post-disaster images. As a transfer learning strategy, the weights of the SSD model are initialized using the weights of the CAE counterpart. (3) Data augmentation strategies, such as image mirroring, rotation, Gaussian blur, and Gaussian noise processing, are utilized to augment the training data set. As a case study, aerial images of Hurricane Sandy in 2012 were maximized to validate the proposed method’s effectiveness. Experiments show that the pretraining strategy can improve of 10% in terms of overall accuracy compared with the SSD trained from scratch. These experiments also demonstrate that using data augmentation strategies can improve mAP and mF1 by 72% and 20%, respectively. Finally, the experiment is further verified by another dataset of Hurricane Irma, and it is concluded that the paper method is feasible.


2019 ◽  
Vol 2019 ◽  
pp. 1-9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michał Klimont ◽  
Mateusz Flieger ◽  
Jacek Rzeszutek ◽  
Joanna Stachera ◽  
Aleksandra Zakrzewska ◽  
...  

Hydrocephalus is a common neurological condition that can have traumatic ramifications and can be lethal without treatment. Nowadays, during therapy radiologists have to spend a vast amount of time assessing the volume of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) by manual segmentation on Computed Tomography (CT) images. Further, some of the segmentations are prone to radiologist bias and high intraobserver variability. To improve this, researchers are exploring methods to automate the process, which would enable faster and more unbiased results. In this study, we propose the application of U-Net convolutional neural network in order to automatically segment CT brain scans for location of CSF. U-Net is a neural network that has proven to be successful for various interdisciplinary segmentation tasks. We optimised training using state of the art methods, including “1cycle” learning rate policy, transfer learning, generalized dice loss function, mixed float precision, self-attention, and data augmentation. Even though the study was performed using a limited amount of data (80 CT images), our experiment has shown near human-level performance. We managed to achieve a 0.917 mean dice score with 0.0352 standard deviation on cross validation across the training data and a 0.9506 mean dice score on a separate test set. To our knowledge, these results are better than any known method for CSF segmentation in hydrocephalic patients, and thus, it is promising for potential practical applications.


Diagnostics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (6) ◽  
pp. 1052
Author(s):  
Leang Sim Nguon ◽  
Kangwon Seo ◽  
Jung-Hyun Lim ◽  
Tae-Jun Song ◽  
Sung-Hyun Cho ◽  
...  

Mucinous cystic neoplasms (MCN) and serous cystic neoplasms (SCN) account for a large portion of solitary pancreatic cystic neoplasms (PCN). In this study we implemented a convolutional neural network (CNN) model using ResNet50 to differentiate between MCN and SCN. The training data were collected retrospectively from 59 MCN and 49 SCN patients from two different hospitals. Data augmentation was used to enhance the size and quality of training datasets. Fine-tuning training approaches were utilized by adopting the pre-trained model from transfer learning while training selected layers. Testing of the network was conducted by varying the endoscopic ultrasonography (EUS) image sizes and positions to evaluate the network performance for differentiation. The proposed network model achieved up to 82.75% accuracy and a 0.88 (95% CI: 0.817–0.930) area under curve (AUC) score. The performance of the implemented deep learning networks in decision-making using only EUS images is comparable to that of traditional manual decision-making using EUS images along with supporting clinical information. Gradient-weighted class activation mapping (Grad-CAM) confirmed that the network model learned the features from the cyst region accurately. This study proves the feasibility of diagnosing MCN and SCN using a deep learning network model. Further improvement using more datasets is needed.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (15) ◽  
pp. 7148
Author(s):  
Bedada Endale ◽  
Abera Tullu ◽  
Hayoung Shi ◽  
Beom-Soo Kang

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are being widely utilized for various missions: in both civilian and military sectors. Many of these missions demand UAVs to acquire artificial intelligence about the environments they are navigating in. This perception can be realized by training a computing machine to classify objects in the environment. One of the well known machine training approaches is supervised deep learning, which enables a machine to classify objects. However, supervised deep learning comes with huge sacrifice in terms of time and computational resources. Collecting big input data, pre-training processes, such as labeling training data, and the need for a high performance computer for training are some of the challenges that supervised deep learning poses. To address these setbacks, this study proposes mission specific input data augmentation techniques and the design of light-weight deep neural network architecture that is capable of real-time object classification. Semi-direct visual odometry (SVO) data of augmented images are used to train the network for object classification. Ten classes of 10,000 different images in each class were used as input data where 80% were for training the network and the remaining 20% were used for network validation. For the optimization of the designed deep neural network, a sequential gradient descent algorithm was implemented. This algorithm has the advantage of handling redundancy in the data more efficiently than other algorithms.


2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 34
Author(s):  
Rong Yang ◽  
Robert Wang ◽  
Yunkai Deng ◽  
Xiaoxue Jia ◽  
Heng Zhang

The random cropping data augmentation method is widely used to train convolutional neural network (CNN)-based target detectors to detect targets in optical images (e.g., COCO datasets). It can expand the scale of the dataset dozens of times while consuming only a small amount of calculations when training the neural network detector. In addition, random cropping can also greatly enhance the spatial robustness of the model, because it can make the same target appear in different positions of the sample image. Nowadays, random cropping and random flipping have become the standard configuration for those tasks with limited training data, which makes it natural to introduce them into the training of CNN-based synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image ship detectors. However, in this paper, we show that the introduction of traditional random cropping methods directly in the training of the CNN-based SAR image ship detector may generate a lot of noise in the gradient during back propagation, which hurts the detection performance. In order to eliminate the noise in the training gradient, a simple and effective training method based on feature map mask is proposed. Experiments prove that the proposed method can effectively eliminate the gradient noise introduced by random cropping and significantly improve the detection performance under a variety of evaluation indicators without increasing inference cost.


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