T. S. Sharath

Shereen Oraby, Lena Reed, Shubhangi Tandon et al.

Natural language generators for task-oriented dialogue must effectively realize system dialogue actions and their associated semantics. In many applications, it is also desirable for generators to control the style of an utterance. To date, work on task-oriented neural generation has primarily focused on semantic fidelity rather than achieving stylistic goals, while work on style has been done in contexts where it is difficult to measure content preservation. Here we present three different sequence-to-sequence models and carefully test how well they disentangle content and style. We use a statistical generator, Personage, to synthesize a new corpus of over 88,000 restaurant domain utterances whose style varies according to models of personality, giving us total control over both the semantic content and the stylistic variation in the training data. We then vary the amount of explicit stylistic supervision given to the three models. We show that our most explicit model can simultaneously achieve high fidelity to both semantic and stylistic goals: this model adds a context vector of 36 stylistic parameters as input to the hidden state of the encoder at each time step, showing the benefits of explicit stylistic supervision, even when the amount of training data is large.

Sharath T. S., Shubhangi Tandon, Ryan Bauer

Ever since the successful application of sequence to sequence learning for neural machine translation systems, interest has surged in its applicability towards language generation in other problem domains. Recent work has investigated the use of these neural architectures towards modeling open-domain conversational dialogue, where it has been found that although these models are capable of learning a good distributional language model, dialogue coherence is still of concern. Unlike translation, conversation is much more a one-to-many mapping from utterance to a response, and it is even more pressing that the model be aware of the preceding flow of conversation. In this paper we propose to tackle this problem by introducing previous conversational context in terms of latent representations of dialogue acts over time. We inject the latent context representations into a sequence to sequence neural network in the form of dialog acts using a second encoder to enhance the quality and the coherence of the conversations generated. The main task of this research work is to show that adding latent variables that capture discourse relations does indeed result in more coherent responses when compared to conventional sequence to sequence models.

Sharath T. S., Shubhangi Tandon

In this paper , we tackle Sentiment Analysis conditioned on a Topic in Twitter data using Deep Learning . We propose a 2-tier approach : In the first phase we create our own Word Embeddings and see that they do perform better than state-of-the-art embeddings when used with standard classifiers. We then perform inference on these embeddings to learn more about a word with respect to all the topics being considered, and also the top n-influencing words for each topic. In the second phase we use these embeddings to predict the sentiment of the tweet with respect to a given topic, and all other topics under discussion.