Natural Language Understanding in Conversational AI with Deep Learning

Caren Han is a senior lecturer at the University of Melbourne, an honorary academic at both the University of Sydney and the University of Edinburgh, and an adjunct professor at POSTECH. She is co-directing the Australia Deep Learning NLP Group. After her PhD in 2017, she received several teaching and research awards, including the Australian Young Achiever Certificate (Teaching Excellence), Teacher of the Year 2020, Supervisor of the Year 2021, Best Research Paper Award in top-tier International Artificial Intelligence Conferences, Early Career Research Award 2023. She currently supervises 23 research students, and her research interests include Natural Language Processing with Deep Learning.

Henry Weld has PhDs in both Computer Science and Mathematics at The University of Sydney and is a member of the Australian Deep Learning NLP Group. His research focuses on Natural Language Understanding, particularly multi-turn NLU, and the use of NLU methodologies in other fields where the data has differing granularity based on aspect.

Yan Li is a PhD student at the University of Sydney and is currently visiting the University of Melbourne. Yan is an NLP researcher in the Australia Deep Learning NLP Group, specialising in long document comprehension and reasoning, multi-turn dialogue systems, and multimodal deep learning. Yan's work focuses on advancing the capabilities of natural language processing through the integration of multiple data modalities and improving comprehension and reasoning over extensive textual content.

Jean Lee is a researcher and data scientist at the Sydney Informatics Hub, a core research facility of the University of Sydney. Her research areas are Natural Language Processing, Information Retrieval, and Artificial Intelligence applications. Prior to academia, she passed the U.S. Uniform Certified Public Accountancy Examination (a.k.a. AICPA) and worked in management consulting firms including Accenture and KPMG.

Josiah Poon is a senior lecturer in the School of Computer Science at the University of Sydney. He co-founded the Australian Deep Learning NLP Group together with Caren Han. His research focuses on having natural language at the hub but integrating with multimodal learning, explainable AI, as well as integrating neural and symbolic approaches.

1. Introduction to Natural Language Understanding.- 2. Prerequisites and Glossary for Natural Language Understanding.- 3. Single-turn Natural Language Understanding.- 4. Multi-turn Natural Language Understanding.- 5. Evaluating Natural Language Understanding.- 6. Applications and Case Studies in Natural Language Understanding.- 7. Challenges, Conclusion and Future Direction.