CSCI-644: Natural Language Dialogue Systems - Spring 2024

Schedule

The schedule below is tentative and subject to change.

Week 1: January 10 

• Traum & Georgila - Oveview, basic principles, genres, different types of dialogue, example dialogue systems, topics to be covered 

• Assignment 1 handed out

Week 2: January 17

• Traum - Overview of Dialogue Structure (turn-taking, initiative, relations, grounding, dialogue acts, intentional structure), types of Dialogue Architectures (modular vs. end-to-end), introduction to  organizing principles for dialogue management

Week 3: January 24

• Georgila - Deep learning approaches to dialogue (including end-to-end architectures and chatbots)

• Assignment 1 due (January 23, 11:59 pm)

• Assignment 2 handed out

Week 4: January 31 

• Traum - The Information State Approach to dialogue systems, Knowledge, Plan, and Logic-based Approaches

Week 5: February 7

• Traum - Identity in Dialogue Systems: Role-play Dialogue Systems, Systems  Representing Real People, Storytelling in Dialogue

• Assignment 2 due (February 6, 11:59 pm)

Week 6: February 14

• Georgila - Reinforcement learning and simulated users for dialogue management (Part 1)

• Assignment 3 handed out

Week 7: February 21

• Georgila - Reinforcement learning and simulated users for dialogue management (Part 2)

Week 8: February 28

• Traum - Multimodal Dialogue, Identity and Story in Dialogue (Part 2)

• Selected special topic due (February 27, 11:59 pm)

Week 9: March 6

• Guest lecture: Dr. Mark Core - Dialogue Systems for Education

• Assignment 3 due (March 5, 11:59 pm)

• Project white paper due (March 5, 11:59 pm)

March 13 - Spring Break

Week 10: March 20 

• Georgila - Speech recognition and speech synthesis for dialogue

• Student topic presentation 

  • Speech synthesis for dialogue  (Xuan Shi & Daniel Yang)

Week 11: March 27

• Traum - Data collection and evaluation

• Student topic presentations 

  • Multi-party dialogue (Khoi Pham)

  • Non-cooperative dialogue systems  (Ritvik Nimmagadda)

• Project proposal due (Sunday March 31, 11:59 pm)

Week 12: April 3 

• Georgila - Dialogue state tracking

• Student topic presentations 

  • Natural language generation for dialogue (Hossein Entezari Zarch)

  • Dialogue act recognition (Hirona Arai)

  • Dialogue systems for language learning (Eric Boxer)

Week 13: April 10

• Student topic presentations 

  • Empathetic dialogue systems with reinforcement learning (Ala Tak & Alireza Ziabari)

  • Storytelling in dialogue (Ankur Chemburkar & Siraj Sandhu)

  • Culture-specific dialogue systems (Yubo Zhang)

  • Chat dialogue (Philipp Eibl & Taiwei Shi)

Week 14: April 17

• Student topic presentations

  • Adversarial attacks on LLMs (Mingzhe Wu)

  • How dialogue state tracking and dialogue summarization can complement each other (Joseph Wang)

• Student project presentations

  • Taiwei Shi & Yubo Zhang

  • Ankur Chemburkar

  • Khoi Pham

Week 15: April 24 

• Student project presentations

  • Siraj Sandhu & Joseph Wang

  • Philipp Eibl & Ritvik Nimmagadda

  • Ala Tak & Alireza Ziabari

  • Arai Hirona

  • Eric Boxer & Hossein Entezari Zarch

  • Mingzhe Wu

  • Xuan Shi & Daniel Yang

Examination period: May 1 

• Student project reports due (May 1, 4 pm)