TASK DEFINITION: In this task, you are given a part of an article. Your task is to generate headline (title) for this text. Preferred headlines are under fifteen words.
PROBLEM: Recently, resources and tasks were proposed to go beyond state tracking in dialogue systems. An example is the frame tracking task, which requires recording multiple frames, one for each user goal set during the dialogue. This allows a user, for instance, to compare items corresponding to different goals. This paper proposes a model which takes as input the list of frames created so far during the dialogue, the current user utterance as well as the dialogue acts, slot types, and slot values associated with this utterance. The model then outputs the frame being referenced by each triple of dialogue act, slot type, and slot value. We show that on the recently published Frames dataset, this model significantly outperforms a previously proposed rule-based baseline. In addition, we propose an extensive analysis of the frame tracking task by dividing it into sub-tasks and assessing their difficulty with respect to our model.

SOLUTION: A Frame Tracking Model for Memory-Enhanced Dialogue Systems

PROBLEM: We present a character-level recurrent neural network that generates relevant and coherent text given auxiliary information such as a sentiment or topic. Using a simple input replication strategy, we preserve the signal of auxiliary input across wider sequence intervals than can feasibly be trained by back-propagation through time. Our main results center on a large corpus of 1.5 million beer reviews from BeerAdvocate. In generative mode, our network produces reviews on command, tailored to a star rating or item category. The generative model can also run in reverse, performing classification with surprising accuracy. Performance of the reverse model provides a straightforward way to determine what the generative model knows without relying too heavily on subjective analysis. Given a review, the model can accurately determine the corresponding rating and infer the beer’s category (IPA, Stout, etc.). We exploit this capability, tracking perceived sentiment and class membership as each character in a review is processed. Quantitative and qualitative empirical evaluations demonstrate that the model captures meaning and learns nonlinear dynamics in text, such as the effect of negation on sentiment, despite possessing no a priori notion of words. Because the model operates at the character level, it handles misspellings, slang, and large vocabularies without any machinery explicitly dedicated to the purpose.

SOLUTION: CHARACTER-LEVEL GENERATIVE TEXT MODELS

PROBLEM: Heuristics used for solving hard real-time search problems have regions with depressions. Such regions are bounded areas of the search space in which the heuristic function is inaccurate compared to the actual cost to reach a solution. Early real-time search algorithms, like LRTA∗, easily become trapped in those regions since the heuristic values of their states may need to be updated multiple times, which results in costly solutions. State-of-the-art real-time search algorithms, like LSS-LRTA∗ or LRTA∗(k), improve LRTA∗’s mechanism to update the heuristic, resulting in improved performance. Those algorithms, however, do not guide search towards avoiding depressed regions. This paper presents depression avoidance, a simple real-time search principle to guide search towards avoiding states that have been marked as part of a heuristic depression. We propose two ways in which depression avoidance can be implemented: mark-and-avoid and move-to-border. We implement these strategies on top of LSS-LRTA∗ and RTAA∗, producing 4 new real-time heuristic search algorithms: aLSS-LRTA∗, daLSS-LRTA∗, aRTAA∗, and daRTAA∗. When the objective is to find a single solution by running the real-time search algorithm once, we show that daLSS-LRTA∗ and daRTAA∗ outperform their predecessors sometimes by one order of magnitude. Of the four new algorithms, daRTAA∗ produces the best solutions given a fixed deadline on the average time allowed per planning episode. We prove all our algorithms have good theoretical properties: in finite search spaces, they find a solution if one exists, and converge to an optimal after a number of trials.

SOLUTION:
Avoiding and Escaping Depressions in Real-Time Heuristic Search