Invited Talk - Loquentes Machinae: Technology, Applications, and Ethics of Conversational Systems

摘要

From HAL in "2001:Space Odyssey" to Samantha in '"Her", conversational systems have always captured the public's imagination as the ultimate intelligent machine. The famous Turing Test was designed to determine whether a machine "thinks" like human or not, based on natural conversation between human and a machine. With the advent of smart devices, conversational systems are suddenly everywhere, talking and responding to us from our phones, speakers, cars and call centers. Meanwhile, the public is also becoming increasingly concerned about privacy and security issues of these systems. In the decades since the first DARPA Communicator project, conversational systems come in many different forms. Whereas research systems are predominantly based on deep learning approaches today, most of the commercial systems from the US and Asia are still using template-based and retrieval-based approaches. Recent advances in such systems include endowing them with the ability to (1) learn to memorize; (2) learn to personalize; and (3) learn to empathize. In all aspects of R&D in this area, we encounter the challenge of a lack of well-balanced and well-labeled data. Hence, multi-task and meta-learning have been proposed as possible solutions. In this talk, I will give an overview of some of the technical challenges, approaches and applications of conversational systems, and the debates on ethical issues surrounding them. I will also highlight some of the cultural differences in this area and discuss how we can collaborate internationally to build conversational systems that are secure, safe, and fair for all.