How to Make Chatbots Smarter: Computational Semantics Beyond Events and Roles

Current chatbot systems have mostly used a swallow semantic representation of text, which have focused on extracting propositional meaning, capturing “who does what to whom, how, when and where”. These chatbots tend to disregard significant meaning encoded in human language. For this reason, it is difficult for them to understand utterances such as “What is the tallest mountain in Vietnam?” or “What is the largest prime less than 2018?”. In this talk, I show that a deep understanding and reasoning of natural language is required in order for a chatbot to better understand an input utterance and produce an appropriate action. This goal can be achieved by semantic parsing, an area within the field of natural language processing. Chatbots can be made more intelligent only by computer scientists with a deep knowledge of computational semantics.

Dr. Le Hong Phuong – Vietnam National University (Vietnam)

Le Hong Phuong received his PhD in computer science at Université de Lorraine, France in 2010; master of information technology at Institut de la Francophonie pour l’Informatique (IFI) in 2005; bachelor of science in applied mathematics-informatics at Hanoi University of Science in 2002. He was a researcher and assistant professor at Ecole des Mines de Nancy and INRIA Lorraine, France from 2010 to 2011. He is currently the head of the Data Science Laboratory at Hanoi University of Science, Vietnam National University. He has been also an associate researcher at FPT Research & Development, FPT Corporation since 2013; a scientific counselor for several AI companies. He has been working in the fields of natural language processing and applied mathematics for nearly 20 years. He has published over 40 scientific papers and has been in programme committees of many national and international scientific conferences. He is the author of some softwares toolkits which are widely used in the Vietnamese text processing community. His website is at http://mim.hus.vnu.edu.vn/phuonglh/