When Gokhan Tur joined Uber AI, he started building a team to add conversational capabilities to the Uber app and to do research on dialogue systems. I was the first to join his team, and have greatly enjoyed working with him and learning from such an accomplished expert in the field.
Under his supervision, we worked on both conversational applications and research.
On the applications side, we added voice capabilities in the Uber driver app that are currently in beta. The safety implications for drivers of our work have been highlighted in a newsroom article, and have been reported by the press:
- https://mashable.com/article/uber-new-safety-features-voice-addresses/
- https://www.therichest.com/gadgets-and-tech/uber-voice-control-addition/
- https://www.rideshareconnection.com/uber-adds-new-safety-measures/
- https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/uber-adds-new-safety-features/
- https://www.businesstraveller.com/business-travel/2018/09/14/uber-adds-safety-features-for-passengers-and-drivers/
On the research side, we published a substantial amount of research in dialogue and NLP. We also developed Plato, a research dialogue systems framework, to speed up our own research with and extensible and powerful tool.
Some highlights of our work together have been discussed in the blogpot summarizing Uber Ai's advancements in 2019.
And here is a list of articles these topic the team published:
- Incorporating the Structure of the Belief State in End-to-end Task-oriented Dialogue Systems, Conversational AI Workshop @ NeurIPS 2018
- Parallax: Visualizing and Understanding the Semantics of Embedding Spaces via Algebraic Formulae, ACL 2019
- Flexibly-structured Model for Task-oriented Dialogues, SIGDIAL 2019
- Collaborative Multi-agent Dialogue Model Training via Reinforcement Learning, SIGDIAL 2019
- Modeling Multi-action Policy for Task-oriented Dialogues, EMNLP 2019
- Plug And Play Language Models: A Simple Approach to Controlled Text Generation, ICLR 2020
- Plato Dialogue System: A Flexible Conversational AI Research Platform, arXiv 2020