Conversational UIs

Overview

Conversational UIs have drawn increasing interest from enterprises and consumers, as an alternative to GUIs, promising the shift in the responsibility of learning from user to interface. Deployed Conversational UIs now start to impact sectors like customer service, connected home solutions, etc.
This course is part of Graduate Certificate Programme in Practical Language Processing.

Course Description & Learning Outcomes

This course provides essential knowledge and skills required to design and build systems that can interact with users using spoken or written natural language. A combination of lectures, case studies, and workshops will be used to cover the applications of conversational UI, architectures and components of such systems, the design of conversation flow and dialogue management, Natural Language Processing techniques enabling systems to understand user utterances, response generation, handling speech input and output, evaluation metrics, etc. At the end of the course, participants will be able to: - Determine the roles that systems with conversational UI can play in fielded applications - Identify and analyse the main components and the architectures of conversational interfaces - Design conversational UI with practical methodology and strategies - Develop applications with conversational UI using traditional and machine learning approaches. - Evaluate the performance of the conversational UI using appropriate metrics

Recommended Prerequisites

- Participants must successfully completed Text Analytics course offered by NUS-ISS. - Participants must have strong programming skills using Python, familiar with packages like Numpy, Pandas, Scikit-Learn, and well versed with Anaconda, Jupyter Notebook, and GitHub. - Participants must have sufficient background knowledge of machine learning and text mining, with experience building models from text data using common ML techniques (e.g. SVM, MLFF NN, etc.) - Participants must code/program/debug in the hands-on practical sessions.

Pre-course instructions

- No printed copies of course materials are issued. - Participants must bring their internet-enabled computing device (laptops, tablet etc) with power charger to access and download course materials. Registration close date: 19/08/2023