Recent advances in applied chatbot technology

•••► Topic: Recent advances in applied chatbot technology •••► Speaker: Jordi Carrera Ventura, Artificial Intelligence technologist at Telefónica R&D •••► Who will be interested: -Students of Computational Linguistics and NLP -Any software developer or computer engineer working on conversational technologies or AI applications more generally. -Data scientists with an interest in chatbots and conversational agents specifically, or language modelling more generally. •••► Where: Grammarly Office, 13 Tereshchenkivska St., Apt 110, 8th floor •••► When: Thursday, September 21st, 7 PM •••► Language: English •••► Registration: https://gram.ly/Fz4K "Chatbots (aka conversational agents, spoken dialogue systems) allow users to interface with computers using natural language by simply asking questions or issuing commands. Given a query, the chatbot builds a semantic representation of the input, transforms it into a logical statement, and performs all the necessary actions to fulfill the user's intent. Sometimes this simply means calculating an exact answer or retrieving a fact from a database, whereas other times it means building a contextual model and running a full-fledged conversation flow while keeping track of anaphoras and cross-references. Besides the direct applications of chatbots in IoT (Amazon’s Alexa, Apple's Siri) and IT (the historical field of Information Retrieval as a whole can be seen as a sub-problem of spoken dialogue systems), chatbots' main appeal for technologists is their location at the intersection of all major Natural Language Processing technologies and many of the deepest questions in Cognitive Science today: semantic parsing, entity recognition, knowledge representation, and coreference resolution. In this talk, I will explore those questions in the context of an applied industry setting, and I will introduce a framework suitable for addressing them, together with an overview of the state-of-the-art in chatbot technology and some original techniques."