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: One of the long-term goals of artificial intelligence is to build an agent that can communicate intelligently with human in natural language. Most existing work on natural language learning relies heavily on training over a pre-collected dataset with annotated labels, leading to an agent that essentially captures the statistics of the fixed external training data. As the training data is essentially a static snapshot representation of the knowledge from the annotator, the agent trained this way is limited in adaptiveness and generalization of its behavior. Moreover, this is very different from the language learning process of humans, where language is acquired during communication by taking speaking action and learning from the consequences of speaking action in an interactive manner. This paper presents an interactive setting for grounded natural language learning, where an agent learns natural language by interacting with a teacher and learning from feedback, thus learning and improving language skills while taking part in the conversation. To achieve this goal, we propose a model which incorporates both imitation and reinforcement by leveraging jointly sentence and reward feedbacks from the teacher. Experiments are conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

SOLUTION: Listen, Interact and Talk: Learning to Speak via Interaction

PROBLEM: Causality has been recently introduced in databases, to model, characterize and possibly compute causes for query results (answers). Connections between queryanswer causality, consistency-based diagnosis, database repairs (wrt. integrity constraint violations), abductive diagnosis and the view-update problem have been established. In this work we further investigate connections between query-answer causality and abductive diagnosis and the view-update problem. In this context, we also define and investigate the notion of query-answer causality in the presence of integrity constraints.

SOLUTION: Causes for Query Answers from Databases, Datalog Abduction and View-Updates: The Presence of Integrity Constraints

PROBLEM: We study multi-turn response generation in chatbots where a response is generated according to a conversation context. Existing work has modeled the hierarchy of the context, but does not pay enough attention to the fact that words and utterances in the context are differentially important. As a result, they may lose important information in context and generate irrelevant responses. We propose a hierarchical recurrent attention network (HRAN) to model both aspects in a unified framework. In HRAN, a hierarchical attention mechanism attends to important parts within and among utterances with word level attention and utterance level attention respectively. With the word level attention, hidden vectors of a word level encoder are synthesized as utterance vectors and fed to an utterance level encoder to construct hidden representations of the context. The hidden vectors of the context are then processed by the utterance level attention and formed as context vectors for decoding the response. Empirical studies on both automatic evaluation and human judgment show that HRAN can significantly outperform state-of-the-art models for multi-turn response generation.

SOLUTION:
Hierarchical Recurrent Attention Network for Response Generation