Blaise Thomson


2017

pdf
Neural Belief Tracker: Data-Driven Dialogue State Tracking
Nikola Mrkšić | Diarmuid Ó Séaghdha | Tsung-Hsien Wen | Blaise Thomson | Steve Young
Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

One of the core components of modern spoken dialogue systems is the belief tracker, which estimates the user’s goal at every step of the dialogue. However, most current approaches have difficulty scaling to larger, more complex dialogue domains. This is due to their dependency on either: a) Spoken Language Understanding models that require large amounts of annotated training data; or b) hand-crafted lexicons for capturing some of the linguistic variation in users’ language. We propose a novel Neural Belief Tracking (NBT) framework which overcomes these problems by building on recent advances in representation learning. NBT models reason over pre-trained word vectors, learning to compose them into distributed representations of user utterances and dialogue context. Our evaluation on two datasets shows that this approach surpasses past limitations, matching the performance of state-of-the-art models which rely on hand-crafted semantic lexicons and outperforming them when such lexicons are not provided.

2016

pdf
Counter-fitting Word Vectors to Linguistic Constraints
Nikola Mrkšić | Diarmuid Ó Séaghdha | Blaise Thomson | Milica Gašić | Lina M. Rojas-Barahona | Pei-Hao Su | David Vandyke | Tsung-Hsien Wen | Steve Young
Proceedings of the 2016 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

2015

pdf
Multi-domain Dialog State Tracking using Recurrent Neural Networks
Nikola Mrkšić | Diarmuid Ó Séaghdha | Blaise Thomson | Milica Gašić | Pei-Hao Su | David Vandyke | Tsung-Hsien Wen | Steve Young
Proceedings of the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 7th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers)

2014

pdf
The PARLANCE mobile application for interactive search in English and Mandarin
Helen Hastie | Marie-Aude Aufaure | Panos Alexopoulos | Hugues Bouchard | Catherine Breslin | Heriberto Cuayáhuitl | Nina Dethlefs | Milica Gašić | James Henderson | Oliver Lemon | Xingkun Liu | Peter Mika | Nesrine Ben Mustapha | Tim Potter | Verena Rieser | Blaise Thomson | Pirros Tsiakoulis | Yves Vanrompay | Boris Villazon-Terrazas | Majid Yazdani | Steve Young | Yanchao Yu
Proceedings of the 15th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL)

pdf
The Second Dialog State Tracking Challenge
Matthew Henderson | Blaise Thomson | Jason D. Williams
Proceedings of the 15th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL)

pdf
Word-Based Dialog State Tracking with Recurrent Neural Networks
Matthew Henderson | Blaise Thomson | Steve Young
Proceedings of the 15th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL)

2013

pdf
Demonstration of the PARLANCE system: a data-driven incremental, spoken dialogue system for interactive search
Helen Hastie | Marie-Aude Aufaure | Panos Alexopoulos | Heriberto Cuayáhuitl | Nina Dethlefs | Milica Gasic | James Henderson | Oliver Lemon | Xingkun Liu | Peter Mika | Nesrine Ben Mustapha | Verena Rieser | Blaise Thomson | Pirros Tsiakoulis | Yves Vanrompay
Proceedings of the SIGDIAL 2013 Conference

pdf
POMDP-based dialogue manager adaptation to extended domains
Milica Gašić | Catherine Breslin | Matthew Henderson | Dongho Kim | Martin Szummer | Blaise Thomson | Pirros Tsiakoulis | Steve Young
Proceedings of the SIGDIAL 2013 Conference

pdf
Deep Neural Network Approach for the Dialog State Tracking Challenge
Matthew Henderson | Blaise Thomson | Steve Young
Proceedings of the SIGDIAL 2013 Conference

2012

pdf
The Effect of Cognitive Load on a Statistical Dialogue System
Milica Gašić | Pirros Tsiakoulis | Matthew Henderson | Blaise Thomson | Kai Yu | Eli Tzirkel | Steve Young
Proceedings of the 13th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue

2011

pdf bib
Spoken Dialog Challenge 2010: Comparison of Live and Control Test Results
Alan W Black | Susanne Burger | Alistair Conkie | Helen Hastie | Simon Keizer | Oliver Lemon | Nicolas Merigaud | Gabriel Parent | Gabriel Schubiner | Blaise Thomson | Jason D. Williams | Kai Yu | Steve Young | Maxine Eskenazi
Proceedings of the SIGDIAL 2011 Conference

2010

pdf
Phrase-Based Statistical Language Generation Using Graphical Models and Active Learning
François Mairesse | Milica Gašić | Filip Jurčíček | Simon Keizer | Blaise Thomson | Kai Yu | Steve Young
Proceedings of the 48th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

pdf
Parameter estimation for agenda-based user simulation
Simon Keizer | Milica Gašić | Filip Jurčíček | François Mairesse | Blaise Thomson | Kai Yu | Steve Young
Proceedings of the SIGDIAL 2010 Conference

pdf
Gaussian Processes for Fast Policy Optimisation of POMDP-based Dialogue Managers
Milica Gašić | Filip Jurčíček | Simon Keizer | Francois Mairesse | Blaise Thomson | Kai Yu | Steve Young
Proceedings of the SIGDIAL 2010 Conference

2009

pdf bib
Proceedings of the ACL-IJCNLP 2009 Student Research Workshop
Brian Roark | Grace Ngai | Davis Muhajereen D. Dimalen | Jenny Rose Finkel | Blaise Thomson
Proceedings of the ACL-IJCNLP 2009 Student Research Workshop

pdf
k-Nearest Neighbor Monte-Carlo Control Algorithm for POMDP-Based Dialogue Systems
Fabrice Lefèvre | Milica Gašić | Filip Jurčíček | Simon Keizer | François Mairesse | Blaise Thomson | Kai Yu | Steve Young
Proceedings of the SIGDIAL 2009 Conference

2008

pdf
Training and Evaluation of the HIS POMDP Dialogue System in Noise
Milica Gašić | Simon Keizer | Francois Mairesse | Jost Schatzmann | Blaise Thomson | Kai Yu | Steve Young
Proceedings of the 9th SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue

2007

pdf
Statistical User Simulation with a Hidden Agenda
Jost Schatzmann | Blaise Thomson | Steve Young
Proceedings of the 8th SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue

pdf
Agenda-Based User Simulation for Bootstrapping a POMDP Dialogue System
Jost Schatzmann | Blaise Thomson | Karl Weilhammer | Hui Ye | Steve Young
Human Language Technologies 2007: The Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics; Companion Volume, Short Papers

pdf
The Hidden Information State Dialogue Manager: A Real-World POMDP-Based System
Steve Young | Jost Schatzmann | Blaise Thomson | Karl Weilhammer | Hui Ye
Proceedings of Human Language Technologies: The Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL-HLT)

pdf bib
Training a real-world POMDP-based Dialog System
Blaise Thomson | Jost Schatzmann | Karl Weilhammer | Hui Ye | Steve Young
Proceedings of the Workshop on Bridging the Gap: Academic and Industrial Research in Dialog Technologies