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COMP_SCI 347, 447: Conversational AI


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Prerequisites

COMP_SCI 371

Description

Principles and practice of creating AI conversational interface systems.  This includes knowledge-rich natural language understanding, multimodal interaction (speech and sketching), principles of dialogue drawn from cognitive science, question-answering, and architectures for building conversational systems.  Involves substantial programming and project work.

SYLLABUS (subject to change):

  • Introduction: Basics of conversational assistants, survey of historical efforts, introduction to first set of tools
  • Psychology of dialogue: common ground, Gricean principles
  • Computational models of dialogue systems: chatbots, collaborative problem solving model, dialogue acts
  • Architecture for dialogue systems: Pipelines behind common assistant programs, cognitive architectures
  • Question Answering: Sources of knowledge, IBM’s Deep Q/A approach
  • Use cases: Information kiosks (including Mudd Kiosk), social robots, eldercare

TEXTBOOK: None. Papers from the literature and draft materials from textbooks in progress will be provided via Canvas

  • Formerly COMP_SCI 396/496 last offer was Spring 2022.
  • This course satisfies the CS Technical Elective requirement.

COURSE INSTRUCTOR: Prof. Ken Forbus