Building Compassionate Conversational Systems via User Modeling Analytics

Research on Conversational Systems is in vogue again spurred by consumer facing conversational agents such as Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa and Microsoft's Cortana. To enable natural, personalized and compassionate conversations, we argue that Conversational Systems must be equipped with User Models. User Models are models of people/users, who use computer systems, that capture users' context, preferences, personality, emotions, intentions etc. While User Modeling has been an area of research in the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) for quite some time, the emergence and rise of social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, where users share/broadcast their daily activities and have social conversations with friends, is providing increased access to user data that can be analyzed (with users' permission) for personalization. In this talk, I will present the work we are doing at IBM Watson to build user models using psycho-linguistic, natural language processing and machine learning approaches in service of enabling natural, personalized and compassionate conversations.

Rama Akkiraju is a Distinguished Engineer, and Master Inventor at IBM. Rama is presently leading the mission of enabling natural, personalized and compassionate conversations between computers and humans via user modeling at IBM's Watson division. Specific projects in user modeling domain that she is leading include: researching and developing technologies to infer people's personalities, emotions, tone, attitudes and intentions etc. from social media data using linguistic and machine learning techniques. In her career, Rama has worked on agent-based decision support systems, electronic market places, and business process integration technologies including semantic Web services, for which she drove a World-Wide-Web (W3C) standard. Rama has co-authored 4 book chapters, and over 50 technical papers. Rama has over dozen issued patents and 20+ others pending. She is the recipient of 3 best paper awards in the areas of AI and Operations Research. Rama also received multiple awards and honors at IBM in her professional career. Rama holds a Masters degree in Computer Science and has received a gold medal from New York University for her MBA.