We present Edina, the University of Edinburgh's social bot for the Amazon Alexa Prize competition. Edina is a conversational agent whose responses utilize data harvested from Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) through an innovative new technique we call self-dialogues. These are conversations in which a single AMT Worker plays both participants in a dialogue. Such dialogues are surprisingly natural, efficient to collect and reflective of relevant and/or trending topics. These self-dialogues provide training data for a generative neural network as well as a basis for soft rules used by a matching score component. Each match of a soft rule against a user utterance is associated with a confidence score which we show is strongly indicative of reply quality, allowing this component to self-censor and be effectively integrated with other components. Edina's full architecture features a rule-based system backing off to a matching score, backing off to a generative neural network. Our hybrid data-driven methodology thus addresses both coverage limitations of a strictly rule-based approach and the lack of guarantees of a strictly machine-learning approach.
Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) have long been recognized for their potential to model complex time series. However, it remains to be determined what optimization techniques and recurrent architectures can be used to best realize this potential. The experiments presented take a deep look into Hessian free optimization, a powerful second order optimization method that has shown promising results, but still does not enjoy widespread use. This algorithm was used to train to a number of RNN architectures including standard RNNs, long short-term memory, multiplicative RNNs, and stacked RNNs on the task of character prediction. The insights from these experiments led to the creation of a new multiplicative LSTM hybrid architecture that outperformed both LSTM and multiplicative RNNs. When tested on a larger scale, multiplicative LSTM achieved character level modelling results competitive with the state of the art for RNNs using very different methodology.