Invited Speech 4: Tuesday 14:30-15:30, December 19th, 2023

Abstract

From Bots to Buddies: Making Conversational Agents More Human-Like

This talk explores two crucial dimensions of Conversational AI: improved understanding and enhanced interaction. The talk will begin with a focus on refining language comprehension through the mitigation of speech recognition errors, ultimately facilitating a more comprehensive understanding of user inputs. Next, we tackle the challenge of scalability, uncovering strategies to maximize the utility of limited dialogue data, thereby enabling adaptive conversational models. Finally, we explore the realm of enriched interaction by seamlessly integrating recommendation systems into conversational interfaces. In sum, these dimensions collectively showcase the potential for substantial progress in Conversational AI, offering valuable insights for future research and innovation in the field.

Biography

Yun-Nung (Vivian) Chen is currently an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science & Information Engineering at National Taiwan University. She earned her Ph.D. degree from Carnegie Mellon University, where her research interests focus on spoken dialogue systems and natural language processing. She was recognized as the Taiwan Outstanding Young Women in Science and received Google Faculty Research Awards, Amazon AWS Machine Learning Research Awards, MOST Young Scholar Fellowship, and FAOS Young Scholar Innovation Award. Her team was selected to participate in the first Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge in 2021. Prior to joining National Taiwan University, she worked in the Deep Learning Technology Center at Microsoft Research Redmond.