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SUMMARY:Natural Language Generation as Planning under Uncertainty for Stat
 istical Interactive Systems - Verena Rieser\, Heriot Watt University
DTSTART:20130301T120000Z
DTEND:20130301T130000Z
UID:TALK42780@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Ekaterina Kochmar
DESCRIPTION:Abstract:\nIn this talk I present a novel approach to Natural 
 Language Generation (NLG) in statistical Spoken Dialogue Systems\, e.g. [W
 illiams & Young\, 2007]\, using a data-driven statistical optimisation fra
 mework for incremental Information Presentation (IP)\, where there is a tr
 ade-off to be solved between presenting “enough” information to the us
 er while keeping the utterances short and understandable.  In a case study
  on recommending restaurants\, we show that an optimised IP strategy outpe
 rforms a baseline mimicking human behaviour in terms of total reward gaine
 d\, in simulation. The policy is then also tested with real users\, and im
 proves on a conventional hand-coded IP strategy with up to a 9.7% increase
  in task success. This methodology provides new insights into the nature o
 f the NLG problem\, which has previously been treated as a module followin
 g dialogue management with limited access to context features.\nThis type 
 of model is now widely used in research applications\, which I will briefl
 y discuss. For example\, optimising information presentation in recommende
 r systems [Rieser & Lemon\, 2010]\, hierarchical NLG [Dethlefs and Cuaya 
 ́huitl 2011]\, personalisation [Janarthanam and Lemon 2010\; Janarthanam 
 et al. 2011] and efficient incremental search [Dethlefs et al. 2012b\; 201
 2a] and trading agents [Rieser et al. 2012].\n\n\nShort Bio:\nVerena is a 
 lecturer in Computer Science at Heriot-Watt University\, Edinburgh. Before
  she has undertaken post-doctoral research at the Schools of Informatics a
 nd GeoSciences at the University of Edinburgh. She holds a PhD (summa cum 
 laude) from Saarland University (2008) and an MSc with distinction from th
 e University of Edinburgh (2004). Her PhD also received the Dr. Eduard-Mar
 tin award for distinguished doctoral dissertations. Her research is at the
  intersection of Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing\, with a
 pplications ranging from Multi-Modal Interaction\, Spoken Dialogue System 
 and Computational Sustainability. She is currently serving as secretary fo
 r the ACL Special Interest group in Natural Language Generation (SIGGEN) a
 nd she has recently published a book on "Reinforcement Learning for Spoken
  Dialogue Systems" (Springer\, 2011). Since starting her research career i
 n 2005\, she has co-authored over 40 original research papers\, which were
  cited over 400 times (H-Index: 13 according to Google Scholar). Verena ha
 s strong ties to industry\, where she is a visiting researcher at Nuance's
  Research Lab\, Sunnyvale in 2013.\nFor more details please see: http://ww
 w.macs.hw.ac.uk/~vtr1/\n
LOCATION:FW11\, Computer Laboratory
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