LING 575F: Recent Advances in Task-Oriented Dialog Systems

University of Washington - Spring 2021

Course Description

Task-oriented dialog systems are in high demand with the increased adoption of voice assistant devices in recent years. In this course, we will study recent advances in natural language understanding and generation for task-oriented dialog systems, including topics such as semantic parsing, grounding, personalization and evaluation. Participants will read, present and actively engage in discussions on these topics. In order to relate our discussions to real-world dialog systems, students may choose to do a focused evaluation or extension of an existing dialog system of their choice. Prerequisites: Ling 570, Ling 571 and Ling 572 or instructor permission.

Instructor: Waleed Ammar, PhD, senior research scientist at Google.

Logistics

• Meeting times: Friday 1-3:20 PM (April 2 thru June 18, 2021)
• Meeting location: Zoom only.
• Recording: All meetings will be recorded and made available only to enrolled students. However, due to the discussion-oriented nature of this course, enrolled students are expected to join the Zoom meetings and participate in real time.
• Mailing list: multi_ling575i_sp21@u.washington.edu. If you're not already on the mailing list, you can subscribe here.
• Office hours: By appointment (feel free to email the instructor to schedule a time.)
• Reviews: are due every Thursday by 11:59pm Pacific Time
• Presenting: please check the papers schedule below to find out which days you'll be leading the discussion in order to prepare accordingly.
• Projects: instead of submitting reviews, you may choose to do a project with three milestones: one-page proposal by April 15, one-page mid-quarter progress report by May 13, and 4-page final report by June 17.
• Course materials are hosted on Google Drive here, which is shared with the uw.edu emails of all enrolled students. If you do not already have access, please let the instructor know what email you'd like to use.
• Evaluation breakdown: 40% class participation, 40% writing, 20% presentation
• If you have any questions, do not hesitate to email the instructor at wammar@google.com. Note: emails sent to waleeda@uw.edu and waleeda@u.washington.edu will be automatically forwarded to my @google.com email.

Course Schedule