Academic Year:
2022/23
8025 - Master in Intelligent Interactive Systems
31642 - Natural Language Interaction
Teaching Plan Information
Academic Course:
2022/23
Academic Center:
802 - Masters Centre of the Engineering Department
Study:
8025 - Master in Intelligent Interactive Systems
Subject:
31642 - Natural Language Interaction
Ambit:
---
Credits:
5.0
Course:
1
Teaching languages:
Teachers:
Leo Wanner , Aleksandr Shvets
Teaching Period:
Second quarter
Schedule:
Presentation
The course covers the central themes involved in the interaction with intelligent agents through the use of natural language, with emphasis on dialogue and language generation. We will also study planning techniques applied to the theory of speech acts and the use of rhetorical structures, both for controlled dialogues as for dynamic and non-cooperative dialogues. Regarding analysis and generation of language, students will learn robust and incremental techniques capable of dealing with partial, and even ungrammatical discourse, as it's typical of spontaneous dialogues. We will also look at the design of dialogue architectures, and analyze the use of dialogue in "chatbots" and videogames. The course also covers spoken interaction including aspects on automatic speech recognition, automatic speaker recognition, and text-to-speech synthesis.
Associated skills
The course contributes to the basic and advanced skills and expertise acquired during the master studies on Intelligent Interactive Systems:
- The capacity to collect and interpret relevant data in the area of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence in general and Natural Language-based Human-Computer Interaction in particular in order to be able to assess and comment on relevant topics from the scientific, ethical and social points of view.
- The capacity to communicate information, ideas, problems and solutions in the area of Natural Language-based Interaction to general public and NLP scholars alike.
- The capacity to apply the acquired skills in order to build operational conversational agent prototypes.
Furthermore, the course contributes to transversal skills related to
CE1. Solving the mathematical problems which can be set out in the arise in engineering and apply the knowledge on: linear algebra; differential and integral calculus; numerical methods, numerical algorithms, statistics, and optimization.
CE8. Mastering the concepts of data programming and programming and data structures, including principles of secure design and defensive programming, program verification and error detection.
CE10. Recognizing basic algorithmic procedures and applying them for the resolution of computational problems, analyzing the solution’s suitability and complexity.
CE11. Solving complex computational problems using the principles and techniques of intelligent systems.
Learning outcomes
It is expected that the students will obtain knowledge about state-of-the-art NLP techniques and acquire the skills to both integrate publicly available off-the-shelf modules into applications and develop on their own simple applications that use state-of-the-art techniques. In particular:
Using knowledge of statistics to solve problems which can be set out in the in engineering.
Designing and using advanced data structures and the most proper suitable algorithms for solving a problem.
Applying basic techniques of artificial intelligence.
Solving complex problems using machine learning techniques.
Applying advanced intelligent computation techniques for the design and development of intelligent applications.
Sustainable Development Goals
Natural Language Processing applications related to human-machine interaction contribute to the achievement of most of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (including, e.g., Goal 1 – No Poverty, Goal 3 – Ensure Healthy Lives and Promote Well-Being for All at all Ages, Goal 4 – Quality Education, etc.).
Prerequisites
In order to be able to follow the course, the students should have have a formal mindset, some programming skills, and some background knowledge in machine learning.
Contents
- Introduction: History of human-computer interaction, problem statements, typical applications.
- Dialogue models, basic types of dialogues (conversational analysis, principles and characteristics of cooperative and non-cooperative dialogues), pragmatics.
- Dialogue strategies (types of dialogue strategies, relation to the game theory); speech act and discourse structure driven dialogue strategies.
- User modeling in dialogue systems.
- Dialogue languages.
- Machine learning techniques in dialogue systems.
- Linguistic background for natural language parsing (analysis) and generation.
- Parsing 1: Basic syntactic parsing techniques
- Parsing 2: Robust semantic parsing
- Generation 1: Stochastic generation techniques
- Generation 2: Incremental language generation
- Design of dialogue systems
- Applications 1: Case study of dialogues in selected chatbots
- Applications 2: Case study of dialogues in selected role-oriented video games.
Teaching Methods
The theoretical foundations and the application of the material of the course are being taught in class in terms of lectures. The practical skills for building Natural Language Interaction applications are acquired in a home project that small groups of 3 to 4 students carry out over the entire course.
Evaluation
- Home Project, which is to be presented and demonstrated in front of the class at the end of the course: 60%
- Exam (either written or oral): 40%
Bibliography and information resources
Lyon, Richard F. "Human and machine hearing: extracting meaning from sound". Cambridge, United Kingdom : Cambridge University Press, 2017.
Goldberg, Yoav. "Neural Network Methods in Natural Language Processing". Morgan & Claypool Publishers, 2017.