Time for a Better (Natural Language) Understanding

The CognitionX offices are aflurry these days with CogX ramping up (London June 10–12), momentum building behind our AI advice network, and of course the world of AI for speech and text never stands still!

Tremendously interesting pieces this week: a couple of news from UK and Finnish governments, along with some highlights of highlights from an important AI conference called AAAI.

As a by-product of our commercial research, each week our teams curate around 200 articles on AI: this news briefing is the top 6 we picked. But if you want to see the others swing over to CogntionX.com.

Also in this issue of Speaking Naturally:

• 🚔Ok Google, call the police!
• ⌛️Understanding time in natural language
• 🗣Conversational AI recent papers summarised

Leading the Pack

Finnish government goes all-in on virtual assistants
In Finland, the government is piloting a pioneering use of AI that could result in the most ambitious public-sector AI assistant in the world. Of note, “the user — and no one else — is the data owner”.
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OK Google, call the police!
How do you call the police if you are tied up or trapped as hostage in your own home and can’t reach your phone? What if a fire is making it difficult to reach the phone or you can’t see a thing from all the smoke? London’s Metropolitan police will “change the face of police contact” by allowing users to make calls using their voice, via smart speakers! “Alexa, call the police”. “OK Google, fire!”. Once patched through to the Met, these virtual assistants will be able to state their problem as if they were making a 999 call.
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Numbers that Matter

UK AI assistant-enabled companies seeing accelerated growth
Rather than a concern for lost jobs, again and again CognitionX is seeing software solutions like AI assistants for PA tasks addressing unmet demand for skills from our traditional workforce.
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CognitionX Research

Chatbots in Telecommunications: Business Case Studies (NEW REPORT)
If you’re a senior leader in the telecommunications sector, curious about the potential of a conversational AI strategy, CognitionX’s latest report on chatbot case studies for telcos is designed to help accelerate your ability to create strategies with confidence.

The questions the report explores:

• What does good look like for chatbots in the telecommunications sector?
• What are some examples of successful case studies?
• What do they cost and return-on-investment windows?
• + many others

£195+VAT for one license, £995+VAT for 10 licenses of this report Register Interest: Chatbots in Telcos

Under the Hood

Time for Better Understanding
Time is a critical aspect of natural language understanding and in this technical video you see the very latest progress by Qiang Nign from the highly prestigious Allen Institute, including some progress on “common sense” which is eye-opening.
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NLP Highlights of AAAI Papers in 2019
NLP expert, Sebastian Ruder, presents the highlights of the Thirty-Third AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-19).
DIALOGUE: smart speakers avoid solving the hard problems of dialogue. They provide the illusion of having a dialogue but in fact do not have a clue what we are saying or meaning. As a result, 75–80% of the time users only employ 4 skills: “play music”, “set a timer”, “set a reminder”, and “what is the weather”. What we should rather do is recognise intents via semantic parsing.
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ADVERSARIAL LEARNING: Ian Goodfellow discusses semi-supervised learning applications with GANs
(video)

Conversational AI Papers Summarised
So whats the current state-of-the-art in dialog systems and intelligent agents?

According to a summary of major conversational AI papers published recently, things like assigning a personality to the AI for more more consistent and engaging chit-chat.

Facebook AI Research introduce the new PERSONA-CHAT dataset (10K dialogues conditioned on 1,155 personality profiles) for training AI to ask personality-related questions, remember the answers, and use them naturally in conversations. Training using personas has also shown to improve the performance of end-to-end dialogue systems.
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