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: We introduce a new spatial data structure for high dimensional data called the approximate principal direction tree (APD tree) that adapts to the intrinsic dimension of the data. Our algorithm ensures vector-quantization accuracy similar to that of computationally-expensive PCA trees with similar time-complexity to that of loweraccuracy RP trees. APD trees use a small number of powermethod iterations to find splitting planes for recursively partitioning the data. As such they provide a natural trade-off between the running-time and accuracy achieved by RP and PCA trees. Our theoretical results establish a) strong performance guarantees regardless of the convergence rate of the powermethod and b) that O(log d) iterations suffice to establish the guarantee of PCA trees when the intrinsic dimension is d. We demonstrate this trade-off and the efficacy of our data structure on both the CPU and GPU.

SOLUTION: Approximate Principal Direction Trees

PROBLEM: Speaker intent detection and semantic slot filling are two critical tasks in spoken language understanding (SLU) for dialogue systems. In this paper, we describe a recurrent neural network (RNN) model that jointly performs intent detection, slot filling, and language modeling. The neural network model keeps updating the intent prediction as word in the transcribed utterance arrives and uses it as contextual features in the joint model. Evaluation of the language model and online SLU model is made on the ATIS benchmarking data set. On language modeling task, our joint model achieves 11.8% relative reduction on perplexity comparing to the independent training language model. On SLU tasks, our joint model outperforms the independent task training model by 22.3% on intent detection error rate, with slight degradation on slot filling F1 score. The joint model also shows advantageous performance in the realistic ASR settings with noisy speech input.

SOLUTION: Joint Online Spoken Language Understanding and Language Modeling with Recurrent Neural Networks

PROBLEM: Instant messaging is one of the major channels of computer mediated communication. However, humans are known to be very limited in understanding others’ emotions via textbased communication. Aiming on introducing emotion sensing technologies to instant messaging, we developed EmotionPush, a system that automatically detects the emotions of the messages end-users received on Facebook Messenger and provides colored cues on their smartphones accordingly. We conducted a deployment study with 20 participants during a time span of two weeks. In this paper, we revealed five challenges, along with examples, that we observed in our study based on both user’s feedback and chat logs, including (i) the continuum of emotions, (ii) multi-user conversations, (iii) different dynamics between different users, (iv) misclassification of emotions, and (v) unconventional content. We believe this discussion will benefit the future exploration of affective computing for instant messaging, and also shed light on research of conversational emotion sensing.

SOLUTION:
Challenges in Providing Automatic Affective Feedback in Instant Messaging Applications