In intelligent assistants that perform both chatting and tasks through dialogue, like Siri and Alexa, users often make ambiguous utterances such as “I’m hungry” or “I have a headache,” which can be interpreted as either chat or task intents. Naively determining these intents can lead to mismatched responses, spoiling the user experience. Therefore, it is desirable to determine the ambiguity of user utterances. We created a dataset from an actual intelligent assistant via crowdsourcing and analyzed tendencies of ambiguous utterances. Using this labeled data of chat, task, and ambiguous intents, we developed a supervised intent classification model. To detect ambiguous utterances robustly, we propose feeding sentence embeddings developed from microblogs and search logs with a self-attention mechanism. Experiments showed that our model outperformed two baselines, including a strong LLM-based one. We will release the dataset.

We make decisions by reacting to changes in the real world, particularly the emergence and disappearance of impermanent entities such as restaurants, services, and events. Because we want to avoid missing out on opportunities or making fruitless actions after those entities have disappeared, it is important to know when entities disappear as early as possible. We thus tackle the task of detecting disappearing entities from microblogs where various information is shared timely. The major challenge is detecting uncertain contexts of disappearing entities from noisy microblog posts. To collect such disappearing contexts, we design time-sensitive distant supervision, which utilizes entities from the knowledge base and time-series posts. Using this method, we actually build large-scale Twitter datasets of disappearing entities. To ensure robust detection in noisy environments, we refine pretrained word embeddings for the detection model on microblog streams in a timely manner. Experimental results on the Twitter datasets confirmed the effectiveness of the collected labeled data and refined word embeddings; the proposed method outperformed a baseline in terms of accuracy, and more than 70% of the detected disappearing entities in Wikipedia are discovered earlier than the update on Wikipedia, with the average lead-time is over one month.

Analyzing microblogs where we post what we experience enables us to perform various applications such as social-trend analysis and entity recommendation. To track emerging trends in a variety of areas, we want to categorize information on emerging entities (e.g., Avatar 2) in microblog posts according to their types (e.g., Film). We thus introduce a new entity typing task that assigns a fine-grained type to each emerging entity when a burst of posts containing that entity is first observed in a microblog. The challenge is to perform typing from noisy microblog posts without relying on prior knowledge of the target entity. To tackle this task, we build large-scale Twitter datasets for English and Japanese using time-sensitive distant supervision. We then propose a modular neural typing model that encodes not only the entity and its contexts but also meta information in multiple posts. To type ‘homographic’ emerging entities (e.g., ‘Go’ means an emerging programming language and a classic board game), which contexts are noisy, we devise a context selector that finds related contexts of the target entity. Experiments on the Twitter datasets confirm the effectiveness of our typing model and the context selector.

There exist biases in individual’s language use; the same word (e.g., cool) is used for expressing different meanings (e.g., temperature range) or different words (e.g., cloudy, hazy) are used for describing the same meaning. In this study, we propose a method of modeling such personal biases in word meanings (hereafter, semantic variations) with personalized word embeddings obtained by solving a task on subjective text while regarding words used by different individuals as different words. To prevent personalized word embeddings from being contaminated by other irrelevant biases, we solve a task of identifying a review-target (objective output) from a given review. To stabilize the training of this extreme multi-class classification, we perform a multi-task learning with metadata identification. Experimental results with reviews retrieved from RateBeer confirmed that the obtained personalized word embeddings improved the accuracy of sentiment analysis as well as the target task. Analysis of the obtained personalized word embeddings revealed trends in semantic variations related to frequent and adjective words.

In our everyday chit-chat, there is a conversation initiator, who proactively casts an initial utterance to start chatting. However, most existing conversation systems cannot play this role. Previous studies on conversation systems assume that the user always initiates conversation, and have placed emphasis on how to respond to the given user’s utterance. As a result, existing conversation systems become passive. Namely they continue waiting until being spoken to by the users. In this paper, we consider the system as a conversation initiator and propose a novel task of generating the initial utterance in open-domain non-task-oriented conversation. Here, in order not to make users bored, it is necessary to generate diverse utterances to initiate conversation without relying on boilerplate utterances like greetings. To this end, we propose to generate initial utterance by summarizing and chatting about news articles, which provide fresh and various contents everyday. To address the lack of the training data for this task, we constructed a novel large-scale dataset through crowd-sourcing. We also analyzed the dataset in detail to examine how humans initiate conversations (the dataset will be released to facilitate future research activities). We present several approaches to conversation initiation including information retrieval based and generation based models. Experimental results showed that the proposed models trained on our dataset performed reasonably well and outperformed baselines that utilize automatically collected training data in both automatic and manual evaluation.

Recently emerged intelligent assistants on smartphones and home electronics (e.g., Siri and Alexa) can be seen as novel hybrids of domain-specific task-oriented spoken dialogue systems and open-domain non-task-oriented ones. To realize such hybrid dialogue systems, this paper investigates determining whether or not a user is going to have a chat with the system. To address the lack of benchmark datasets for this task, we construct a new dataset consisting of 15,160 utterances collected from the real log data of a commercial intelligent assistant (and will release the dataset to facilitate future research activity). In addition, we investigate using tweets and Web search queries for handling open-domain user utterances, which characterize the task of chat detection. Experimental experiments demonstrated that, while simple supervised methods are effective, the use of the tweets and search queries further improves the F₁-score from 86.21 to 87.53.