Natural Language Generation for Low-resource Domains

预计到2021年，亚马逊的Alexa和苹果的Siri等基于人工智能（AI）的对话系统将超过全球人口100亿。这种互动技术产品已经在日常生活的许多方面变得普遍，通过用自然语言有效地沟通来回答问题、描述或总结数据，并在多个领域提供协助，为决策、教育、健康和娱乐提供支持。然而，为了开发这样的系统，人工智能需要访问大量的对话示例，这可能(1)由于不可用性，在许多领域很难获得；(2)造成隐私问题，影响用户对[2]的吸收。当前的响应生成技术主要基于预先指定的模板，这些模板限制了语言的覆盖范围。生成自然流畅的响应在很大程度上依赖于示例对话，这在许多领域几乎是不可用的。为了解决这些相互关联的挑战，该项目将首先开发自然语言生成技术，该技术能够通过重用在其他数据丰富的领域中学习到的知识来从有限的资源中学习，类似于人类大脑通过建立先验知识来有效学习新技能的方式。其次，我们将开发新的保护隐私的人工智能方法来解决第二个重要挑战，并消除数据去匿名化的风险。尽管在理解自然语言方面的最新进展使得准确预测用户话语的含义并从而准确地告知个人助理的行动成为可能，但以自然语言进行响应仍然是当前一代对话系统和个人助理的瓶颈。随着更多生成自然语言的交互系统变得可用，为了提高最终用户的满意度和参与度，对生成文本的自然可变性和新颖性的需求变得非常重要。因此，该项目还将开发人工智能方法，生成显示新颖性和可变性的文本，以丰富单词选择，同时保持生成文本的语义不变。最后，许多现实世界的应用程序，如个人助理（以及聊天机器人和社交机器人），支持健康或教育，将受益于生成的响应，显示同情和适应用户的心理状态。这需要从文本中深刻理解情感，因此，该项目将首次开发和整合创新的、基于自然语言“概念”的方法，从底层文本中理解用户情感，并为新的文本生成方法提供信息。在整个雄心勃勃的项目中，我们的工业合作伙伴提供的实际案例研究将用于验证我们开发的人工智能方法。参考文献：[1]https://ovum.informa.com/resources/product-content/virtual-digital-assistants-to-overtake-world-population-by-2021 [2] https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/amazon-alexa-echo-listening-spy-security-a8865056.html

It is expected that by 2021, Artificial Intelligence (AI) based dialogue systems such as Amazon's Alexa and Apple's Siri will exceed the earth's population [1]. Such interactive technology products have already become prevalent in many aspects of everyday life, offering support for decision making, education, and health as well as entertainment, by effectively communicating in natural language to answer questions, describe or summarise data, and assist in multiple areas. To develop such systems, however, AI requires access to vast amounts of examples of dialogues, which can (1) be hard to attain in many domains due to unavailability; and (2) pose privacy concerns, impacting user uptake [2]. Current response generation techniques are heavily based on pre-specified templates that limit language coverage. Generating naturally fluent responses is heavily dependant on example dialogues, that are scarcely available in many domains. To address these interlinked challenges, the project will firstly develop natural language generation techniques that are able to learn from limited resources by reusing the knowledge learnt in other data-rich domains, similar to the way the human brain learns new skills efficiently by building on prior knowledge. Secondly, we will develop novel privacy-preserving AI methods to address the second important challenge, and eliminate the risk for de-anonymisation of data. Although recent advances in understanding natural language have made it possible to accurately predict the meaning of users' utterances and hence accurately inform the personal assistants' actions, responding in natural language remains a bottleneck for the current generation of dialogue systems and personal assistants. As more interactive systems generating natural language become available, the need for natural variability and novelty in the generated text becomes significant in order to increase end-user satisfaction and engagement. Therefore the project will also develop AI approaches that generate text that shows novelty and variability for enriching the word choice while keeping the semantics of the generated text unchanged. Finally, many real-world applications such as personal assistants (and also chatbots and social robots) that support health or education, will benefit from generated responses that show empathy and adapt to users' psychological state. This requires a deep understanding of emotions from text, therefore, this project will, for the first time, develop and integrate innovative, natural language 'concept' based approaches, to understand user emotions from underlying text, and inform novel text generation approaches. Practical case studies provided by our industrial partners will be used to validate our developed AI approaches, throughout this ambitious project.References:[1] https://ovum.informa.com/resources/product-content/virtual-digital-assistants-to-overtake-world-population-by-2021 [2] https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/amazon-alexa-echo-listening-spy-security-a8865056.html