An Empirical Study of Factors Affecting Language-Independent Models

Scaling existing applications and solutions to multiple human languages has traditionally proven to be difficult, mainly due to the language-dependent nature of preprocessing and feature engineering techniques employed in traditional approaches. In this work, we empirically investigate the factors affecting language-independent models built with multilingual representations, including task type, language set and data resource. On two most representative NLP tasks -- sentence classification and sequence labeling, we show that language-independent models can be comparable to or even outperforms the models trained using monolingual data, and they are generally more effective on sentence classification. We experiment language-independent models with many different languages and show that they are more suitable for typologically similar languages. We also explore the effects of different data sizes when training and testing language-independent models, and demonstrate that they are not only suitable for high-resource languages, but also very effective in low-resource languages.

Characterizing machine learning process: A maturity framework

Academic literature on machine learning modeling fails to address how to make machine learning models work for enterprises. For example, existing machine learning processes cannot address how to define business use cases for an AI application, how to convert business requirements from offering managers into data requirements for data scientists, and how to continuously improve AI applications in term of accuracy and fairness, and how to customize general purpose machine learning models with industry, domain, and use case specific data to make them more accurate for specific situations etc. Making AI work for enterprises requires special considerations, tools, methods and processes. In this paper we present a maturity framework for machine learning model lifecycle management for enterprises. Our framework is a re-interpretation of the software Capability Maturity Model (CMM) for machine learning model development process. We present a set of best practices from our personal experience of building large scale real-world machine learning models to help organizations achieve higher levels of maturity independent of their starting point.

Challenge AI Mind: A Crowd System for Proactive AI Testing

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has burrowed into our lives in various aspects; however, without appropriate testing, deployed AI systems are often being criticized to fail in critical and embarrassing cases. Existing testing approaches mainly depend on fixed and pre-defined datasets, providing a limited testing coverage. In this paper, we propose the concept of proactive testing to dynamically generate testing data and evaluate the performance of AI systems. We further introduce Challenge.AI, a new crowd system that features the integration of crowdsourcing and machine learning techniques in the process of error generation, error validation, error categorization, and error analysis. We present experiences and insights into a participatory design with AI developers. The evaluation shows that the crowd workflow is more effective with the help of machine learning techniques. AI developers found that our system can help them discover unknown errors made by the AI models, and engage in the process of proactive testing.

Don't get Lost in Negation: An Effective Negation Handled Dialogue Acts Prediction Algorithm for Twitter Customer Service Conversations

In the last several years, Twitter is being adopted by the companies as an alternative platform to interact with the customers to address their concerns. With the abundance of such unconventional conversation resources, push for developing effective virtual agents is more than ever. To address this challenge, a better understanding of such customer service conversations is required. Lately, there have been several works proposing a novel taxonomy for fine-grained dialogue acts as well as develop algorithms for automatic detection of these acts. The outcomes of these works are providing stepping stones for the ultimate goal of building efficient and effective virtual agents. But none of these works consider handling the notion of negation into the proposed algorithms. In this work, we developed an SVM-based dialogue acts prediction algorithm for Twitter customer service conversations where negation handling is an integral part of the end-to-end solution. For negation handling, we propose several efficient heuristics as well as adopt recent state-of- art third party machine learning based solutions. Empirically we show model's performance gain while handling negation compared to when we don't. Our experiments show that for the informal text such as tweets, the heuristic-based approach is more effective.

"How May I Help You?": Modeling Twitter Customer Service Conversations Using Fine-Grained Dialogue Acts

Given the increasing popularity of customer service dialogue on Twitter, analysis of conversation data is essential to understand trends in customer and agent behavior for the purpose of automating customer service interactions. In this work, we develop a novel taxonomy of fine-grained "dialogue acts" frequently observed in customer service, showcasing acts that are more suited to the domain than the more generic existing taxonomies. Using a sequential SVM-HMM model, we model conversation flow, predicting the dialogue act of a given turn in real-time. We characterize differences between customer and agent behavior in Twitter customer service conversations, and investigate the effect of testing our system on different customer service industries. Finally, we use a data-driven approach to predict important conversation outcomes: customer satisfaction, customer frustration, and overall problem resolution. We show that the type and location of certain dialogue acts in a conversation have a significant effect on the probability of desirable and undesirable outcomes, and present actionable rules based on our findings. The patterns and rules we derive can be used as guidelines for outcome-driven automated customer service platforms.

25 Tweets to Know You: A New Model to Predict Personality with Social Media

Predicting personality is essential for social applications supporting human-centered activities, yet prior modeling methods with users written text require too much input data to be realistically used in the context of social media. In this work, we aim to drastically reduce the data requirement for personality modeling and develop a model that is applicable to most users on Twitter. Our model integrates Word Embedding features with Gaussian Processes regression. Based on the evaluation of over 1.3K users on Twitter, we find that our model achieves comparable or better accuracy than state of the art techniques with 8 times fewer data.