Automatic response generation with reasoning, personalized knowledge graphs and emotional intelligence.

会话是人与人之间的一种交互式言语交际，是传递信息、社交和发展友谊的重要组成部分。对话在人类生活中发挥着重要的作用，可以表达情感，交流知识和思想，分享观点。这种交流方式清楚地体现了人类的智慧。自动生成与人类无法区分的对话的尝试可以追溯到人工智能的早期阶段。与蒙面机器的面对面对话一直是评估机器智能的终极考验。然而，这一努力综合产生流畅的对话互动仍然是一项重大挑战。苹果、雅虎、谷歌和微软分别发布了与人类进行某种对话的流行对话代理，如Siri、Alexa、Google Assistant和Cortana，这些代理具有欺骗性：它们误导公众，使其相信聊天机器人问题已经解决。然而，所有这些聊天机器人都是以目标为导向的，基于基于规则的硬编码模板来处理诸如订购产品、在餐厅预订餐桌、预订机票等请求，或者通过访问现有的知识库来回答事实问题，例如谁是安大略省省长？或者温哥华的天气怎么样？换句话说，现有的会话代理是面向任务的问答系统，无法处理典型的日常闲聊对话。我们的研究计划专注于解决与生成现实的类似人类的对话交互相关的实用和基础问题，我们称之为开放式对话。这项研究的目的是针对实际问题，如产生话题互动，在长时间的对话中转换主题，口头表达情感，根据先前的语境产生会话幽默，利用语境知识，用事实推理，令人信服地辩论等。本研究的动机是开发更自然的人机交互界面，并为老年人提供陪伴等支持系统。在不同的国家和文化中，许多人和心理学和老年病学专家都认识到了陪伴的必要性。对于老年人来说，这种需要有伴侣的需求更加重要。事实上，孤独和社会孤立可能预示着老年人健康状况的下降和生活质量的下降。全球人口正在老龄化，尽管许多老年人更喜欢呆在家里，但对于其他住在现有养老院的人来说，没有足够的工作人员或志愿者来帮助他们娱乐或分散注意力，无聊很快就会出现。社会互动可以减少上述孤独和社会孤立的影响。一种解决方案是一种软件代理，它可以智能地对话，并嵌入到平板电脑或其他家用电器中。

Conversation, an interactive verbal communication between people, is an important part of conveying information, socializing, and developing companionship. Conversation plays a vital role in human life to express emotions, exchange knowledge and ideas, and share opinions. This form of communication expresses a clear manifestation of human intelligence. The attempt to automatically generate conversations indistinguishable from human ones dates back to the early stages of Artificial Intelligence. Head-to-head dialogue with a masked machine has been the ultimate test to evaluate machine intelligence. However, this endeavour to synthetically produce fluent dialogue interactions still stands as a significant challenge. The release of popular conversational agents conducting some sort of dialogue with humans, such as Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant, and Cortana, by respectively, Apple, Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft are deceiving: They mislead the public to believe that the chatbot problem is solved. However, all these chatbots are goal-oriented grounded on rule-based hard-coded templates to treat requests such as ordering products, reserving a table at a restaurant, booking a flight ticket etc., or answering factoid questions by accessing existing knowledge bases, such as who is the premier of Ontario? or what is the weather like in Vancouver? In other words, existing conversational agents are task-oriented question-answering systems that are unable to entertain a typical day-to-day chitchat conversation. Our research program focuses on solving pragmatic and foundational problems related to generating realistic human-like conversation interactions, that we call open-ended conversations. The aim is to target practical issues like generating on-topic interactions, transitioning subjects in a long conversation, verbally expressing emotion, generating conversational humour in response to previous context, exploiting context knowledge, reasoning with facts, arguing convincingly, etc. The motivation for this research is the development of more natural human-machine interaction interfaces and providing support systems such as companionship to the elderly. The need for companionship has been identified by many people and experts in psychology and geriatrics in different countries and cultures. This need to have a companion is even more important for older people. Indeed, loneliness and social isolation can predict, for the elderly, declining health and poor quality of life. The population is aging globally and while many elderly prefer staying at home, for others who are admitted in available nursing homes, there is not enough staff or volunteers to assist with their entertainment or distraction, and boredom sets in quickly. Social interactions can reduce the mentioned effects of loneliness and social isolation. One solution is a software agent that could intelligently converse and be embedded in tablets or other domestic appliances.