scholarly journals Evaluation of Abstraction Capabilities and Detection of Discomfort with a Newscaster Chatbot for Entertaining Elderly Users

Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (16) ◽  
pp. 5515
Author(s):  
Francisco de Arriba-Pérez ◽  
Silvia García-Méndez ◽  
Francisco J. González-Castaño ◽  
Enrique Costa-Montenegro
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Natural Language Generation ◽  
Digital Inclusion ◽  
User Interest ◽  
Language Generation ◽  
Machine Learning Model ◽  
Content Support ◽  
Elderly Users ◽  
Differential Feature

We recently proposed a novel intelligent newscaster chatbot for digital inclusion. Its controlled dialogue stages (consisting of sequences of questions that are generated with hybrid Natural Language Generation techniques based on the content) support entertaining personalisation, where user interest is estimated by analysing the sentiment of his/her answers. A differential feature of our approach is its automatic and transparent monitoring of the abstraction skills of the target users. In this work we improve the chatbot by introducing enhanced monitoring metrics based on the distance of the user responses to an accurate characterisation of the news content. We then evaluate abstraction capabilities depending on user sentiment about the news and propose a Machine Learning model to detect users that experience discomfort with precision, recall, F1 and accuracy levels over 80%.

scholarly journals The Rare Word Issue in Natural Language Generation: A Character-Based Solution

Informatics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 20
Author(s):  
Giovanni Bonetta ◽  
Marco Roberti ◽  
Rossella Cancelliere ◽  
Patrick Gallinari
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language ◽  
Error Probability ◽  
Essential Feature ◽  
Proper Names ◽  
Neural Model ◽  
Natural Language Generation ◽  
Training Phase ◽  
Tabular Data ◽  
Rare Word ◽  
Language Generation

In this paper, we analyze the problem of generating fluent English utterances from tabular data, focusing on the development of a sequence-to-sequence neural model which shows two major features: the ability to read and generate character-wise, and the ability to switch between generating and copying characters from the input: an essential feature when inputs contain rare words like proper names, telephone numbers, or foreign words. Working with characters instead of words is a challenge that can bring problems such as increasing the difficulty of the training phase and a bigger error probability during inference. Nevertheless, our work shows that these issues can be solved and efforts are repaid by the creation of a fully end-to-end system, whose inputs and outputs are not constrained to be part of a predefined vocabulary, like in word-based models. Furthermore, our copying technique is integrated with an innovative shift mechanism, which enhances the ability to produce outputs directly from inputs. We assess performance on the E2E dataset, the benchmark used for the E2E NLG challenge, and on a modified version of it, created to highlight the rare word copying capabilities of our model. The results demonstrate clear improvements over the baseline and promising performance compared to recent techniques in the literature.

ProBot – A Procedure Chatbot for Digital Procedural Adherence

2020 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
pp. 224-228
Author(s):  
Nilesh Ade ◽  
Noor Quddus ◽  
Trent Parker ◽  
S.Camille Peres
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Deep Learning ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Industry 4.0 ◽  
Natural Language Generation ◽  
Conversational Agent ◽  
Safe Distance ◽  
Process Industries ◽  
Language Generation ◽  
Plastic Pellets

One of the major implications of Industry 4.0 will be the application of digital procedures in process industries. Digital procedures are procedures that are accessed through a smart gadget such as a tablet or a phone. However, like paper-based procedures their usability is limited by their access. The issue of accessibility is magnified in tasks such as loading a hopper car with plastic pellets wherein the operators typically place the procedure at a safe distance from the worksite. This drawback can be tackled in the case of digital procedures using artificial intelligence-based voice enabled conversational agent (chatbot). As a part of this study, we have developed a chatbot for assisting digital procedure adherence. The chatbot is trained using the possible set of queries from the operator and text from the digital procedures through deep learning and provides responses using natural language generation. The testing of the chatbot is performed using a simulated conversation with an operator performing the task of loading a hopper car.

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