Due to the significance and value in human-computer interaction and natural language processing, task-oriented dialog systems are attracting more and more attention in both academic and industrial ...communities. In this paper, we survey recent advances and challenges in task-oriented dialog systems. We also discuss three critical topics for task-oriented dialog systems: (1) improving data efficiency to facilitate dialog modeling in low-resource settings, (2) modeling multi-turn dynamics for dialog policy learning to achieve better task-completion performance, and (3) integrating domain ontology knowledge into the dialog model. Besides, we review the recent progresses in dialog evaluation and some widely-used corpora. We believe that this survey, though incomplete, can shed a light on future research in task-oriented dialog systems.
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► We identify factors that cause method bias. ► We discuss the psychological mechanisms through which they produce their biasing effects. ► We propose procedural remedies to ...counterbalance or offset these effects.
There is a great deal of evidence that method bias influences item validities, item reliabilities, and the covariation between latent constructs. In this paper, we identify a series of factors that may cause method bias by undermining the capabilities of the respondent, making the task of responding accurately more difficult, decreasing the motivation to respond accurately, and making it easier for respondents to satisfice. In addition, we discuss the psychological mechanisms through which these factors produce their biasing effects and propose several procedural remedies that counterbalance or offset each of these specific effects. We hope that this discussion will help researchers anticipate when method bias is likely to be a problem and provide ideas about how to avoid it through the careful design of a study.
As prose dramatic texts Plato's dialogues would have been read by their original audience as an alternative type of theatrical composition. The 'paradox' of the dialogue form is explained by his ...appropriation of the discourse of theatre, the dominant public mode of communication of his time. The oral performance of his works is suggested both by the pragmatics of the publication of literary texts in the classical period and by his original role as a Sokratic dialogue-writer and the creator of a fourth dramatic genre. Support comes from a number of pieces of evidence, from a statue of Sokrates in the Academy (fourth century BC) to a mosaic of Sokrates in Mytilene (fourth century AD), which point to a centuries-old tradition of treating the dialogues in the context of performance literature and testify to the significance of the image of 'Plato the prose dramatist' for his original and subsequent audiences.
What happens when fictional characters acknowledge our 'presence' as film spectators? By virtue of its eccentricity and surprising frequency as a filmic device, direct address enables us to ask some ...fundamental questions of film theory, history and criticism and tackle, head-on, assumptions about the cinema as a medium. Brown provides a broad understanding of the role of direct address within fiction cinema, with focused analysis of its role in certain strands of avant-garde or experimental cinema, on the one hand, and popular genre traditions (musicals and comedies) on the other.
A dialogue state tracker is a component in a task-oriented dialogue system that monitors the current state of a conversation and gives information about its context and history to other system ...components. The dynamic and open-ended character of human interactions is one of the primary obstacles in dialogue state monitoring, necessitating robust and adaptable models to keep up with the quick context changes. Recently, numerous deep learning-based algorithms have been developed for this purpose. Still, these models are typically heavily-engineered and conceptually sophisticated, making them challenging to deploy, debug, and maintain in a production environment. To overcome these challenges, we offer the BERT-SIAM-DST model, a unique way to dialogue state monitoring employing a Siamese network with BERT as the base network. This model uses the robust representation capabilities of BERT and the ability of Siamese networks to record correlations between inputs to make accurate predictions regarding the current state of the discussion. In addition, the number of parameters does not increase proportionally with the size of the ontology, and the model is adaptable to alterations in the domain ontology. We test the performance of the BERT-SIAM-DST model on the standard WoZ 2.0 dataset of annotated dialogues and compare it to other approaches. Compared to numerous baseline models, the BERT-SIAM-DST model is effective at tracking the state of discussions, demonstrating the promise of BERT-based Siamese networks for this purpose.
It is challenging for a persona-based chitchat system to return responses consistent with the dialog context and the persona of the agent. This particularly holds for a retrieval-based chitchat ...system that selects the most appropriate response from a set of candidates according to the dialog context and the persona of the agent. A persona usually has some dominant topics (e.g., sports, music). Adhering to these topics can enhance the consistency of responses. However, previous studies rarely explore the topical semantics of the agent’s persona in the chitchat system, which often fails to return responses coherent with the persona. In this paper, we propose a Topic-Aware Response Selection (TARS) model, capturing multi-grained matching between the dialog context and a response and also between the persona and a response at both the word and the topic levels, to select the appropriate topic-aware response from the pool of response candidates. Empirical results on the public persona-based empathetic conversation (PEC) data demonstrate the promising performance of the TARS model for response selection.
Fearing that our overreliance on an individual, heroic model of leadership will only continue to dampen the energy and creativity of people in our organizations and communities, this essay proposes a ...practice perspective of leadership based on a collaborative agency mobilized through engaged social interaction. After briefly reviewing the emerging practice tradition in leadership studies, the article turns to the inseparable connection between leadership and agency and discusses how structure may pacify but, under dialogic conditions, release agency. Acknowledging the cultural constraints against collaborative agency, the account affirms its potential realization through interpersonal interaction and sociality. Specific leadership activities associated with collaborative agency and their conditions are illustrated. The paper concludes by showing how the collaborative agentic model might produce a more sustainable future for our world while suggesting avenues for future research of a collective rather than a personal approach to leadership.
POST-WAR JAPANESE PACIFISM AS A TOOL FOR BUILDING INTERCULTURAL DIALOGUE
The end of World War II marked the beginning of a long and complicated process of reconstructing a collective identity for the ...Japanese people, a process that largely continues to this day. The best example of this is the presence of contrasting attitudes toward the events of the war. This article highlights issues related to pacifist values and their relevance to the collective identity of contemporary Japanese. With the collapse of the previous identity at the end of World War II, pacifism has become one of the key values for contemporary Japanese. Using the concept of “core values” developed by Jerzy Smolicz, this article examines postwar pacifist movements from the mid-1950s through the 21st century.
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