Robust Conversational AI with Grounded Text Generation

#Deep #Learning #Artificial #Intelligence

Dr. Jianfeng Gao, Distinguished Scientist & Vice President at Microsoft

Abstract:

In this talk, I present a hybrid approach based on a Grounded Text Generation (GTG) model to building robust task bots at scale.  GTG is a hybrid model which uses a large-scale Transform neural network as its backbone, combined with symbol manipulation modules for knowledge base inference and prior knowledge encoding, to generate responses grounded in dialog belief state and real-world knowledge for task completion.  GTG is pre-trained on large amounts of raw text and human conversational data, and can be fine-tuned to complete a wide range of tasks. 

The hybrid approach and its variants are being developed simultaneously by multiple research teams. The primary results reported on task-oriented dialog benchmarks are very promising, demonstrating big potential of this approach. I provide an overview of this progress and discuss related methods and technologies that can be incorporated for building robust conversational AI systems.

Bio:  

Jianfeng Gao is a Distinguished Scientist and Vice President of Microsoft. He is the manager of the Deep Learning (DL) group at Microsoft Research, leading the development of AI systems for natural language processing, Web search, vision language understanding, dialogue, and business applications. He is an IEEE fellow.

From 2014 to 2017, he was Partner Research Manager at Deep Learning Technology Center at Microsoft Research, Redmond, where he was leading the research on deep learning for text and image processing. From 2006 to 2014, he was Principal Researcher at Natural Language Processing Group at Microsoft Research, Redmond, where he worked on Web search, query understanding and reformulation, ads prediction, and statistical machine translation. From 2005 to 2006, he was a Research Lead in Natural Interactive Services Division at Microsoft, where he worked on Project X, an effort of developing natural user interface for Windows. From 2000 to 2005, he was Research Lead in Natural Language Computing Group at Microsoft Research Asia, where he and his colleagues developed the first Chinese speech recognition system released with Microsoft Office, the Chinese/Japanese Input Method Editors (IME) which were the leading products in the market, and the natural language platform for Microsoft Windows.

More information about Dr Gao can be found here:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/people/jfgao/