Abstract
Recently, natural language processing applications have become very popular in the industry. Examples of such applications include “semantic” enterprise search engines, document categorizers, speech recognizers and – last but not least – conversational agents, also known as virtual assistants or “chatbots”. The latter in particular are very sought-after in the customer care domain, where the aim is to complement the live agent experience with an artificial intelligence able to help users fulfil a task. In this paper, we discuss the challenges and limitations of industrial chatbot applications, with a particular focus on the “human-in-the-loop” aspect, whereby a cooperation between human and machine takes place in mutual interest. Furthermore, we analyse how the same aspect intervenes in other industrial natural language processing applications.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Explore related subjects
Discover the latest articles, news and stories from top researchers in related subjects.References
Alexandersson J, Becker T (2001) Overlay as the basic operation for discourse processing in a multimodal dialogue system. Proceedings of 2nd IJCAI Workshop on Knowledge and Reasoning in Practical Dialogue Systems
Braun D, Hernandez Mendez A, Matthes F, Langen M (2017) Evaluating natural language services for conversational question answering systems. In: Proceedings of the SIGDIAL 2017 Conference, pp 174–185
Churcher GE, Atwell ES, Souter C (1997) Dialogue management systems: a survey and overview. Technical report 97.06
Gonzàlez M, Quarteroni S, Riccardi G, Varges G (2010) Cooperative user models in statistical dialog simulators. In: Proceedings of the SIGDIAL 2010 Conference, pp 217–210
Grosz BJ, Sidner CL (1986) Attention, intentions, and the structure of discourse. Comput Linguist 12(3):175–204
Kitano H, Van Ess-Dykema C (1991) Toward a plan-based understanding model for mixed-initiative dialogues. Proceedings of ACL’91, pp 25–32
Mann S (1998) Humanistic Computing: “WearComp” as a new framework and application for intelligent signal processing. Proc IEEE 86(11), doi:10.1109/5.726784
McGlashan S, Fraser N, Gilbert N, Bilange E, Heisterkamp P, Youd N (1992) Dialogue management for telephone information systems. Proceedings of the International Conference on Applied Language Processing’92, pp 245–246
Quarteroni S, Manandhar S (2009) Designing an interactive open-domain question answering system. Nat Lang Eng 15(1):73–95, doi:10.1017/S1351324908004919
Salton G, Wong A, Yang CS (1975) A vector space model for automatic indexing. Commun ACM 18(11):613. doi:10.1145/361219.361220
Sinclair JM, Coulthard RM (1975) Towards an Analysis of Discourse: The English used by Teachers and Pupils. Oxford University Press, London
Sturm J, den Os EA, Boves L (1999) Issues in spoken dialogue systems: Experiences from the Dutch arise train timetable information system. Proceedings of the ESCA Workshop on Interactive Dialogue in Multi-Modal Systems
Weizenbaum J (1976) Computer power and human reason: from judgment to calculation. W H Freeman and Company, San Francisco, ISBN 0-7167-0463-3
Xiong W, Drop J, Huang X, Seide F, Seltzer M, Stolke A, Yu D, Zweig G (2017) The Microsoft 2016 Conversational Speech Recognition System. In: Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), doi:10.1109/ICASSP.2017.7953159
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Quarteroni, S. Natural Language Processing for Industry. Informatik Spektrum 41, 105–112 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00287-018-1094-1
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00287-018-1094-1