Conversational Machine Comprehension: a Literature Review

One of the emerging research trends in natural language understanding is machine reading comprehension (MRC) which is the task to find answers to human questions based on textual data. While many datasets have been developed for MRC research for other languages, there is a lack of such resources for the Vietnamese language. Although many datasets and methodologies have been developed for English and Chinese, many Vietnamese machine reading comprehension limitations need to be solved further. Existing Vietnamese datasets for MRC research concentrate solely on answerable questions. However, in reality, questions can be unanswerable for which the correct answer is not stated in the given textual data. To address the weakness, we provide the research community with a benchmark dataset named UIT-ViQuAD 2.0 for evaluating the MRC task and question answering systems for the Vietnamese language. We use UIT-ViQuAD 2.0 as a benchmark dataset for the shared task on Vietnamese machine reading comprehension (VLSP2021-MRC) at the Eighth Workshop on Vietnamese Language and Speech Processing (VLSP 2021). This task attracted 77 participant teams from 34 universities and other organizations. Each participant was provided with the training data, including 28,457 annotated question-answer pairs, and returned the result on a public test set of more than 3,821 questions and a private test set of 3,712 questions. In this article, we present details of the organization of the shared task, an overview of the methods employed by shared-task participants, and the results. The highest performances in this competition are 77.24% (in EM) and 67.43% (in F1-score) on the private test set. The Vietnamese MRC systems proposed by the top 3 teams use XLM-RoBERTa, a powerful pre-trained language model based on the transformer architecture that has achieved state-of-the-art results on many natural language processing tasks. We believe that releasing the UIT-ViQuAD 2.0 dataset motivates more researchers to improve Vietnamese machine reading comprehension.

BackgroundExtractive methods for machine reading comprehension (MRC) tasks have achieved comparable or better accuracy than human performance on benchmark data sets. However, such models are not as successful when adapted to complex domains such as health care. One of the main reasons is that the context that the MRC model needs to process when operating in a complex domain can be much larger compared with an average open-domain context. This causes the MRC model to make less accurate and slower predictions. A potential solution to this problem is to reduce the input context of the MRC model by extracting only the necessary parts from the original context.ObjectiveThis study aims to develop a method for extracting useful contexts from long articles as an additional component to the question answering task, enabling the MRC model to work more efficiently and accurately.MethodsExisting approaches to context extraction in MRC are based on sentence selection strategies, in which the models are trained to find the sentences containing the answer. We found that using only the sentences containing the answer was insufficient for the MRC model to predict correctly. We conducted a series of empirical studies and observed a strong relationship between the usefulness of the context and the confidence score output of the MRC model. Our investigation showed that a precise input context can boost the prediction correctness of the MRC and greatly reduce inference time. We proposed a method to estimate the utility of each sentence in a context in answering the question and then extract a new, shorter context according to these estimations. We generated a data set to train 2 models for estimating sentence utility, based on which we selected more precise contexts that improved the MRC model’s performance.ResultsWe demonstrated our approach on the Question Answering Data Set for COVID-19 and Biomedical Semantic Indexing and Question Answering data sets and showed that the approach benefits the downstream MRC model. First, the method substantially reduced the inference time of the entire question answering system by 6 to 7 times. Second, our approach helped the MRC model predict the answer more correctly compared with using the original context (F1-score increased from 0.724 to 0.744 for the Question Answering Data Set for COVID-19 and from 0.651 to 0.704 for the Biomedical Semantic Indexing and Question Answering). We also found a potential problem where extractive transformer MRC models predict poorly despite being given a more precise context in some cases.ConclusionsThe proposed context extraction method allows the MRC model to achieve improved prediction correctness and a significantly reduced MRC inference time. This approach works technically with any MRC model and has potential in tasks involving processing long texts.

Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) is the process where computers or, machines are taught to understand a paragraph or more technically called a context. Like humans, machines also need to be evaluated for their understanding on question answering. MRC is one of the formidable sub-domains in the Natural Language Processing (NLP) domain, which has seen considerable progress over the years. In recent years, many novel datasets have tried to challenge the Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) models with inference based question answering. With the advancement in NLP, many models have surpassed human-level performance on these datasets, albeit ignoring the obvious disparity between genuine human-level performance and state-of-the-art performance. This highlights the need for attention on the collective improvement of existing datasets, metrics, and models towards “real” prehension. Addressing the lack of sanity in the domain, this paper performs a comparative study on various transformer based models and tries to highlight the success factors of each model. Subsequently, we discuss an MRC model that performs comparatively better, if not the best, on question answering and give directions for future research.KeywordsTransformerNatural language processingReading comprehensionQuestion answeringDeep learning

Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Natural Language Generation (NLG) are the general methods that support machine understanding of text content. They play a very important role in the text information processing system including recommendation and question and answer systems. There are many researches in the field of NLU such as Bag of words, N-Gram, and neural network language model. These models have achieved a good performance in NLU and NLG tasks. However, since they require lots of training data, it is difficult to obtain rich data in practical applications. Thus, pretraining becomes important. This paper proposes a semisupervised way to deal with math word problem (MWP) tasks using unsupervised pretraining and supervised tuning methods, which are based on the Unified pretrained Language Model (UniLM). The proposed model requires fewer training data than traditional models since it uses model parameters of tasks that have been learned before to initialize the model parameters of new tasks. In this way, old knowledge helps new models successfully perform new tasks from old experiences instead of from scratch. Moreover, in order to help the decoder make accurate predictions, we combine the advantages of AR and AE language models to support one-way, sequence-to-sequence, and two-way predictions. Experiments, carried out on MWP tasks with 20,000+ mathematical questions, show that the improved model outperforms the traditional models with a maximum accuracy of 79.57%. The impact of different experiment parameters is also studied in the paper and we found that a wrong arithmetic order leads to incorrect solution expression generation.

In artificial intelligence and computational linguistics, natural language understanding (NLU) is a subfield of natural language processing that deals with machine reading comprehension. The goal of an NLU system is to interpret an input text fragment. The process of interpretation can be viewed as a translation of the text from a natural language to a representation in an unambiguous formal language. This representation, supposed to expressthe text’s content, is further used for performing concrete tasks implied by a user request

The integration of Natural Language Processing (NLP) in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) represents a significant advancement towards achieving more natural and effective communication between humans and robots. This research explores the application of state-of-the-art NLP techniques to enhance HRI, focusing on improving robots' abilities to understand and generate human language. Key components of our approach include advanced speech recognition, natural language understanding (NLU), dialogue management, and natural language generation (NLG). We designed and implemented an HRI system that leverages models such as BERT for language understanding and GPT-3 for generating contextually appropriate responses. Our methodology involves integrating these NLP models with a robotics platform, ensuring real-time interaction capabilities while maintaining a high level of accuracy and context awareness. The system was evaluated through a series of user studies, measuring performance metrics such as accuracy, latency, and user satisfaction. Results indicate that our NLP-enhanced HRI system significantly improves the quality of interactions, demonstrating superior understanding and responsiveness compared to traditional systems. This paper discusses the implementation challenges, including computational constraints and ambiguity resolution, and provides insights into user feedback and system performance. Future work will focus on enhancing context management, exploring multimodal interaction, and addressing ethical considerations in deploying advanced HRI systems. Our findings underscore the potential of NLP to transform human-robot communication, paving the way for more intuitive and effective robotic assistants in various domains. Keywords: Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), Natural Language Processing (NLP), Conversational AI, Speech Recognition, Natural Language Understanding (NLU), Natural Language Generation (NLG), Multimodal Interaction, Dialogue Systems, Context Awareness, Emotion Recognition, Machine Learning in HRI, Personalized Interaction, User Experience (UX) in HRI, Human-Centered Design, Collaborative Robots (Cobots)

Natural Language Processing (NLP) and related technologies are critical for the success of many Internet applications such as digital libraries, e-commerce and customer service. This talk presents some recent research efforts and trends of four sets of NLP technologies for Internet applications. First, neural language model has been a very popular research direction in the last a few years that serves as the foundation of many NLP technologies and has significantly improved the performance of many applications; Second, machine translation techniques have been substantially advanced to better bridge the language barriers for many Internet applications; Third, the identification of inappropriate Internet text information (e.g., pornographic content) is a challenging research topic due to the diversified text representation; Fourth, machine reading comprehension has been become an important question and answering technology to directly satisfy information needs of many Internet users. These technologies will be discussed with examples from large-scale real-world applications.

Natural language understanding often requires deep semantic knowledge.Expanding on previous proposals, we suggest that some important aspects of semantic knowledge can be modeled as a language model if done at an appropriate level of abstraction.We develop two distinct models that capture semantic frame chains and discourse information while abstracting over the specific mentions of predicates and entities.For each model, we investigate four implementations: a "standard" N-gram language model and three discriminatively trained "neural" language models that generate embeddings for semantic frames.The quality of the semantic language models (SemLM) is evaluated both intrinsically, using perplexity and a narrative cloze test and extrinsically -we show that our SemLM helps improve performance on semantic natural language processing tasks such as co-reference resolution and discourse parsing.

The essence of "Internet plus" is the relationship and its intelligent connection mode, which promotes the cross-border integration of information communication technology with all walks of life and reduces the information asymmetry. At a time when so much new knowledge is generated every day in the form of text that no one can digest on their own, machine reading comprehension can process vast amounts of information for people to use. With the development of psychometric theory and network technology, computerized adaptive testing has more and more advantages than traditional testing. Most of the current selection strategies are designed based on project response theory and cognitive diagnosis theory, which cannot point out students' learning ability, while cognitive diagnosis can not only evaluate students' ability, but also point out the knowledge of the subjects. This article tries to explore the application of adaptive machine reading comprehension in the measurement system, and build a machine reading comprehension model, introduces the application value of the machine in reading comprehension, secondly to build an adaptive measurement system can be used to machine reading model, finally attempts to solve through the experiment measurement system of text slices and accurately identify the problem.

Machine Reading Comprehension(MRC), including a series of tasks that test the ability of models to understand natural language, has received quite a few attention in Natural Language Processing(NLP). Most existing works deal with MRC tasks by exploiting the expression capability of neural networks. Some of them have achieved impressive performance. Despite the rapid iteration of the models used, few work have focused on output layer and prediction method of answer span - also known as span extraction. In this paper, we focus on span extraction in the Question Answering(QA) task. A cross-sectional comparison of widely used span extraction methods is presented, with their strengths and weaknesses noted in detail. Furthermore, inspired by Faster R-CNN, we propose a brand new span extraction method. Experiment results show that our proposed method outperforms existing span extraction methods on both English and Chinese MRC tasks.

Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) is a challenging task in Natural Language Processing (NLP) field. It is a fast evolving field in the recent years because of the development of large-scale datasets and the deep learning technology. Even though, numerous MRC models have been developed for Question Answer (QA) system, the existing MRC models are not on par with reading comprehension. In order to assess and improve the performance of the projected datasets, an advanced level of evaluation metrics have been introduced. Therefore, this work has conducted a survey over the existing MRC models and evaluation metrics utilized in them to address the lack of MRC with human reading.

Over 97 million inhabitants speak Vietnamese as the native language in the world. However, there are few research studies on machine reading comprehension (MRC) in Vietnamese, the task of understanding a document or text, and answering questions related to it. Due to the lack of benchmark datasets for Vietnamese, we present the Vietnamese Question Answering Dataset (UIT-ViQuAD), a new dataset for the low-resource language as Vietnamese to evaluate MRC models. This dataset comprises over 23,000 human-generated question-answer pairs based on 5,109 passages of 174 Vietnamese articles from Wikipedia. In particular, we propose a new process of dataset creation for Vietnamese MRC. Our in-depth analyses illustrate that our dataset requires abilities beyond simple reasoning like word matching and demands complicate reasoning such as single-sentence and multiple-sentence inferences. Besides, we conduct experiments on state-of-the-art MRC methods in English and Chinese as the first experimental models on UIT-ViQuAD, which will be compared to further models. We also estimate human performances on the dataset and compare it to the experimental results of several powerful machine models. As a result, the substantial differences between humans and the best model performances on the dataset indicate that improvements can be explored on UIT-ViQuAD through future research. Our dataset is freely available to encourage the research community to overcome challenges in Vietnamese MRC.

Transfer learning models have proven superior to classical machine learning approaches in various text classification tasks, such as sentiment analysis, question answering, news categorization, and natural language inference. Recently, these models have shown exceptional results in natural language understanding (NLU). Advanced attention‐based language models like BERT and XLNet excel at handling complex tasks across diverse contexts. However, they encounter difficulties when applied to specific domains. Platforms like Facebook, characterized by continually evolving casual and sophisticated language, demand meticulous context analysis even from human users. The literature has proposed numerous solutions using statistical and machine learning techniques to predict the sentiment (positive or negative) of online customer reviews, but most of them rely on various business, review, and reviewer features, which leads to generalizability issues. Furthermore, there have been very few studies investigating the effectiveness of state‐of‐the‐art pre‐trained language models for sentiment classification in reviews. Therefore, this study aims to assess the effectiveness of BERT, RoBERTa, ALBERT, DistilBERT, and XLNet in sentiment classification using the Yelp reviews dataset. The models were fine‐tuned, and the results obtained with the same hyperparameters are as follows: 98.30 for RoBERTa, 98.20 for XLNet, 97.40 for BERT, 97.20 for ALBERT, and 96.00 for DistilBERT.

Machine reading comprehension (MRC) is a challenging natural language processing (NLP) task. It has a wide application potential in the fields of question answering robots, human‐computer interactions in mobile virtual reality systems, etc. Recently, the emergence of pretrained models (PTMs) has brought this research field into a new era, in which the training objective plays a key role. The masked language model (MLM) is a self‐supervised training objective widely used in various PTMs. With the development of training objectives, many variants of MLM have been proposed, such as whole word masking, entity masking, phrase masking, and span masking. In different MLMs, the length of the masked tokens is different. Similarly, in different machine reading comprehension tasks, the length of the answer is also different, and the answer is often a word, phrase, or sentence. Thus, in MRC tasks with different answer lengths, whether the length of MLM is related to performance is a question worth studying. If this hypothesis is true, it can guide us on how to pretrain the MLM with a relatively suitable mask length distribution for MRC tasks. In this paper, we try to uncover how much of MLM’s success in the machine reading comprehension tasks comes from the correlation between masking length distribution and answer length in the MRC dataset. In order to address this issue, herein, (1) we propose four MRC tasks with different answer length distributions, namely, the short span extraction task, long span extraction task, short multiple‐choice cloze task, and long multiple‐choice cloze task; (2) four Chinese MRC datasets are created for these tasks; (3) we also have pretrained four masked language models according to the answer length distributions of these datasets; and (4) ablation experiments are conducted on the datasets to verify our hypothesis. The experimental results demonstrate that our hypothesis is true. On four different machine reading comprehension datasets, the performance of the model with correlation length distribution surpasses the model without correlation.

This research paper explores the transformative potential of conversational AI and chatbots in enhancing website user experience (UX). It addresses two key research questions: How do these technologies improve user engagement and satisfaction on websites, and what are the primary challenges in implementing them, along with effective solutions. The study examines case studies across diverse industries, including e-commerce, travel, healthcare, and finance, to gain insights into the underlying technologies powering conversational AI and chatbots, such as natural language processing (NLP), natural language understanding (NLU), and machine learning techniques. The paper highlights the significant benefits of integrating conversational AI and chatbots into websites, including providing personalized assistance, streamlining complex processes, ensuring 24/7 availability, and enhancing accessibility for users. However, the study also addresses the key challenges faced in implementation, ranging from handling ambiguity and context in natural language processing to ensuring data privacy and security, managing user expectations, and the need for continuous improvement and training. The research proposes solutions to these challenges, such as employing advanced NLP algorithms, robust API management tools, and establishing user feedback loops. Ethical considerations, including data privacy and addressing biases in AI responses, are also explored, emphasizing the importance of robust encryption, adherence to data privacy regulations, and advanced access control mechanisms. The paper concludes by providing a comprehensive overview of the current state and future directions of conversational AI and chatbots in enhancing website user experience, exploring emerging trends such as multimodal interactions, contextual awareness and personalization, integration with IoT devices, and the development of emotional intelligence and empathy in chatbots.