No Arabic abstract
Conversational agents (CAs) represent an emerging research field in health information systems, where there are great potentials in empowering patients with timely information and natural language interfaces. Nevertheless, there have been limited attempts in establishing prescriptive knowledge on designing CAs in the healthcare domain in general, and diabetes care specifically. In this paper, we conducted a Design Science Research project and proposed three design principles for designing health-related CAs that embark on artificial intelligence (AI) to address the limitations of existing solutions. Further, we instantiated the proposed design and developed AMANDA - an AI-based multilingual CA in diabetes care with state-of-the-art technologies for natural-sounding localised accent. We employed mean opinion scores and system usability scale to evaluate AMANDAs speech quality and usability, respectively. This paper provides practitioners with a blueprint for designing CAs in diabetes care with concrete design guidelines that can be extended into other healthcare domains.
Intelligent assistants that follow commands or answer simple questions, such as Siri and Google search, are among the most economically important applications of AI. Future conversational AI assistants promise even greater capabilities and a better user experience through a deeper understanding of the domain, the user, or the users purposes. But what domain and what methods are best suited to researching and realizing this promise? In this article we argue for the domain of voice document editing and for the methods of model-based reinforcement learning. The primary advantages of voice document editing are that the domain is tightly scoped and that it provides something for the conversation to be about (the document) that is delimited and fully accessible to the intelligent assistant. The advantages of reinforcement learning in general are that its methods are designed to learn from interaction without explicit instruction and that it formalizes the purposes of the assistant. Model-based reinforcement learning is needed in order to genuinely understand the domain of discourse and thereby work efficiently with the user to achieve their goals. Together, voice document editing and model-based reinforcement learning comprise a promising research direction for achieving conversational AI.
Conversational search is based on a user-system cooperation with the objective to solve an information-seeking task. In this report, we discuss the implication of such cooperation with the learning perspective from both user and system side. We also focus on the stimulation of learning through a key component of conversational search, namely the multimodality of communication way, and discuss the implication in terms of information retrieval. We end with a research road map describing promising research directions and perspectives.
Deep reinforcement learning has generated superhuman AI in competitive games such as Go and StarCraft. Can similar learning techniques create a superior AI teammate for human-machine collaborative games? Will humans prefer AI teammates that improve objective team performance or those that improve subjective metrics of trust? In this study, we perform a single-blind evaluation of teams of humans and AI agents in the cooperative card game Hanabi, with both rule-based and learning-based agents. In addition to the game score, used as an objective metric of the human-AI team performance, we also quantify subjective measures of the humans perceived performance, teamwork, interpretability, trust, and overall preference of AI teammate. We find that humans have a clear preference toward a rule-based AI teammate (SmartBot) over a state-of-the-art learning-based AI teammate (Other-Play) across nearly all subjective metrics, and generally view the learning-based agent negatively, despite no statistical difference in the game score. This result has implications for future AI design and reinforcement learning benchmarking, highlighting the need to incorporate subjective metrics of human-AI teaming rather than a singular focus on objective task performance.
Spoken language understanding (SLU) systems in conversational AI agents often experience errors in the form of misrecognitions by automatic speech recognition (ASR) or semantic gaps in natural language understanding (NLU). These errors easily translate to user frustrations, particularly so in recurrent events e.g. regularly toggling an appliance, calling a frequent contact, etc. In this work, we propose a query rewriting approach by leveraging users historically successful interactions as a form of memory. We present a neural retrieval model and a pointer-generator network with hierarchical attention and show that they perform significantly better at the query rewriting task with the aforementioned user memories than without. We also highlight how our approach with the proposed models leverages the structural and semantic diversity in ASRs output towards recovering users intents.
The ability to create artificial intelligence (AI) capable of performing complex tasks is rapidly outpacing our ability to ensure the safe and assured operation of AI-enabled systems. Fortunately, a landscape of AI safety research is emerging in response to this asymmetry and yet there is a long way to go. In particular, recent simulation environments created to illustrate AI safety risks are relatively simple or narrowly-focused on a particular issue. Hence, we see a critical need for AI safety research environments that abstract essential aspects of complex real-world applications. In this work, we introduce the AI safety TanksWorld as an environment for AI safety research with three essential aspects: competing performance objectives, human-machine teaming, and multi-agent competition. The AI safety TanksWorld aims to accelerate the advancement of safe multi-agent decision-making algorithms by providing a software framework to support competitions with both system performance and safety objectives. As a work in progress, this paper introduces our research objectives and learning environment with reference code and baseline performance metrics to follow in a future work.