Workshop: Linguistic Aspects of Bot Creation
This four-parts special workshop introduces the students to the required set of skills for linguistic jobs in industry and provided hands-on-the-job training in the linguistic analysis required for creation, curation and testing of virtual assistants (chat bots). The workshop aimed for the following objectives: (i) perform pragmatic and semantic analysis of human-to-human conversations in the field of customer-service; (ii) implement syntactic and semantic analysis to assess the applicability of the linguistic material from human-to-human interaction for human-to-bot communication; (iii) curate the new data pool for human-to-bot interaction achieving syntactic diversity and semantic crispness; (iv) perform peer-review analysis and bot quality assessment. The last session also includes tech career advice and tips on tools in Natural Language Processing.
The workshop was created by Dr. Marina Sokolova (Machine Learning Data Linguist, Amazon Development Center) and co-taught by Dr. Sokolova and guest lecturer Wesley Orth (Ph.D. candidate, Northwestern University). The workshop was funded by Break Through Tech Chicago and supported by the School of Literatures, Cultural Studies and Linguistics and the Languages and Cultural Resources Center.
