No Arabic abstract
Conversational AI systems are being used in personal devices, providing users with highly personalized content. Personalized knowledge graphs (PKGs) are one of the recently proposed methods to store users information in a structured form and tailor answers to their liking. Personalization, however, is prone to amplifying bias and contributing to the echo-chamber phenomenon. In this paper, we discuss different types of biases in conversational search systems, with the emphasis on the biases that are related to PKGs. We review existing definitions of bias in the literature: people bias, algorithm bias, and a combination of the two, and further propose different strategies for tackling these biases for conversational search systems. Finally, we discuss methods for measuring bias and evaluating user satisfaction.
Adversarial training has been shown as an effective approach to improve the robustness of image classifiers against white-box attacks. However, its effectiveness against black-box attacks is more nuanced. In this work, we demonstrate that some geometric consequences of adversarial training on the decision boundary of deep networks give an edge to certain types of black-box attacks. In particular, we define a metric called robustness gain to show that while adversarial training is an effective method to dramatically improve the robustness in white-box scenarios, it may not provide such a good robustness gain against the more realistic decision-based black-box attacks. Moreover, we show that even the minimal perturbation white-box attacks can converge faster against adversarially-trained neural networks compared to the regular ones.
One-sided network communication technologies such as RDMA and NVMe-over-Fabrics are quickly gaining adoption in production software and in datacenters. Although appealing for their low CPU utilization and good performance, they raise new security concerns that could seriously undermine datacenter software systems building on top of them. At the same time, they offer unique opportunities to help enhance security. Indeed, one-sided network communication is a double-edged sword in security. This paper presents our insights into security implications and opportunities of one-sided communication.
Conversational Recommender Systems (CRSs) in E-commerce platforms aim to recommend items to users via multiple conversational interactions. Click-through rate (CTR) prediction models are commonly used for ranking candidate items. However, most CRSs are suffer from the problem of data scarcity and sparseness. To address this issue, we propose a novel knowledge-enhanced deep cross network (K-DCN), a two-step (pretrain and fine-tune) CTR prediction model to recommend items. We first construct a billion-scale conversation knowledge graph (CKG) from information about users, items and conversations, and then pretrain CKG by introducing knowledge graph embedding method and graph convolution network to encode semantic and structural information respectively.To make the CTR prediction model sensible of current state of users and the relationship between dialogues and items, we introduce user-state and dialogue-interaction representations based on pre-trained CKG and propose K-DCN.In K-DCN, we fuse the user-state representation, dialogue-interaction representation and other normal feature representations via deep cross network, which will give the rank of candidate items to be recommended.We experimentally prove that our proposal significantly outperforms baselines and show its real application in Alime.
Users often formulate their search queries with immature language without well-developed keywords and complete structures. Such queries fail to express their true information needs and raise ambiguity as fragmental language often yield various interpretations and aspects. This gives search engines a hard time processing and understanding the query, and eventually leads to unsatisfactory retrieval results. An alternative approach to direct answer while facing an ambiguous query is to proactively ask clarifying questions to the user. Recent years have seen many works and shared tasks from both NLP and IR community about identifying the need for asking clarifying question and methodology to generate them. An often neglected fact by these works is that although sometimes the need for clarifying questions is correctly recognized, the clarifying questions these system generate are still off-topic and dissatisfaction provoking to users and may just cause users to leave the conversation. In this work, we propose a risk-aware conversational search agent model to balance the risk of answering users query and asking clarifying questions. The agent is fully aware that asking clarifying questions can potentially collect more information from user, but it will compare all the choices it has and evaluate the risks. Only after then, it will make decision between answering or asking. To demonstrate that our system is able to retrieve better answers, we conduct experiments on the MSDialog dataset which contains real-world customer service conversations from Microsoft products community. We also purpose a reinforcement learning strategy which allows us to train our model on the original dataset directly and saves us from any further data annotation efforts. Our experiment results show that our risk-aware conversational search agent is able to significantly outperform strong non-risk-aware baselines.
Conversational search systems, such as Google Assistant and Microsoft Cortana, enable users to interact with search systems in multiple rounds through natural language dialogues. Evaluating such systems is very challenging given that any natural language responses could be generated, and users commonly interact for multiple semantically coherent rounds to accomplish a search task. Although prior studies proposed many evaluation metrics, the extent of how those measures effectively capture user preference remains to be investigated. In this paper, we systematically meta-evaluate a variety of conversational search metrics. We specifically study three perspectives on those metrics: (1) reliability: the ability to detect actual performance differences as opposed to those observed by chance; (2) fidelity: the ability to agree with ultimate user preference; and (3) intuitiveness: the ability to capture any property deemed important: adequacy, informativeness, and fluency in the context of conversational search. By conducting experiments on two test collections, we find that the performance of different metrics varies significantly across different scenarios whereas consistent with prior studies, existing metrics only achieve a weak correlation with ultimate user preference and satisfaction. METEOR is, comparatively speaking, the best existing single-turn metric considering all three perspectives. We also demonstrate that adapted session-based evaluation metrics can be used to measure multi-turn conversational search, achieving moderate concordance with user satisfaction. To our knowledge, our work establishes the most comprehensive meta-evaluation for conversational search to date.