Internship opportunity at Orange Labs

Incomplete requests management in human/machine dialogue.

Entity: Orange Labs.

Department/Team: CRM&DA/NADIA.

Duration: 6 months.

Contact: Hatim KHOUZAIMI (hatim.khouzaimi@orange.com)

About our team:

Orange Labs is the Research and Development division of Orange, the leading telecommunication company in France. The mission of the CRM&DA department (Customer Relationship Management & Data Analytics) is to invent new solutions to improve the company’s interactions with its customers by using data analysis techniques. You will be part of NADIA (Natural DIAlogue interaction), which is one of the teams composing CRM&DA and whose mission is to develop and maintain a human/machine dialogue solution, which is already widely used by customers.

Your mission:

Thanks to the recent improvements in the Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technology, research in the field of Spoken Dialogue Systems (SDSs) has been very active during the late few years. The main challenge is to design user initiative dialogue strategies where the user can use natural language to utter complex requests, with a lot of information, as opposed to system initiative ones, where the request is entered chunk by chunk. However, due to the user’s unfamiliarity with the system and the noise induced by the ASR module, the request captured by the system is often incomplete, hence rejected. The objective of this internship is to figure out solutions to detect whether a request is incomplete and not incorrect and if it is the case, to extract partial information. This will be later used by the Dialogue Manager module to ask the user to add missing information.

In addition, researchers in the field of SDSs are more and more interested in improving the system’s floor management capacities. Instead of adopting a walkie-talkie approach where each of the dialogue participants has to wait for the other to release the floor before processing his utterance and coming up with a response, incremental dialogue suggests that the listener processes the speaker’s utterance on the flow, hence being able to interrupt her. In this frame, the system processes growing partial requests, which is another application of the solutions that will be studied. Incremental dialogue capacities are crucial in the development of a new generation of dialogue systems, which are more human-like, more reactive and less error-prone.

Essential functions:

You will improve the current dialogue solution that is developed and maintained by our

team. For that, you will have to interact with researchers in the field as well as developers.

According to the quality of the solutions that will be proposed, your results can be published in

scientific conferences or lead to a patent.

Qualifications and skills:

- MSc in Computer Science or a related field.

- A specialisation in Natural Language Processing is very welcome.

- Object-Oriented Programming.

- Good background in applied mathematics: probability and statistics.

- Good English level.

- Interest in Human Machine Interaction and Artificial Intelligence.

- Team work.

If you want to be part of an innovative experience in a team of talented people with state of art

skills in the field, please submit your resume by email to hatim.khouzaimi@orange.com.