We present CAiRE-COVID, a real-time question answering (QA) and multi-document summarization system, which won one of the 10 tasks in the Kaggle COVID-19 Open Research Dataset Challenge 1 , judged by medical experts. Our system aims to tackle the recent challenge of mining the numerous scientific articles being published on COVID-19 by answering high priority questions from the community and summarizing salient questionrelated information. It combines information extraction with state-of-the-art QA and queryfocused multi-document summarization techniques, selecting and highlighting evidence snippets from existing literature given a query. We also propose query-focused abstractive and extractive multi-document summarization methods, to provide more relevant information related to the question. We further conduct quantitative experiments that show consistent improvements on various metrics for each module. We have launched our website CAiRE-COVID 2 for broader use by the medical community, and have open-sourced the code 3 for our system, to bootstrap further study by other researches.

We present CAiRE, an end-to-end generative empathetic chatbot designed to recognize user emotions and respond in an empathetic manner. Our system adapts the Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) to empathetic response generation task via transfer learning. CAiRE is built primarily to focus on empathy integration in fully data-driven generative dialogue systems. We create a web-based user interface which allows multiple users to asynchronously chat with CAiRE. CAiRE also collects user feedback and continues to improve its response quality by discarding undesirable generations via active learning and negative training.

In this paper, we describe our approach of enabling an interactive dialogue system to recognize user emotion and sentiment in realtime. These modules allow otherwise conventional dialogue systems to have "empathy" and answer to the user while being aware of their emotion and intent. Emotion recognition from speech previously consists of feature engineering and machine learning where the first stage causes delay in decoding time. We describe a CNN model to extract emotion from raw speech input without feature engineering. This approach even achieves an impressive average of 65.7% accuracy on six emotion categories, a 4.5% improvement when compared to the conventional feature based SVM classification. A separate, CNN-based sentiment analysis module recognizes sentiments from speech recognition results, with 82.5 Fmeasure on human-machine dialogues when trained with out-of-domain data.

Since the late 1990s when speech companies began providing their customer-service software in the market, people have gotten used to speaking to machines. As people interact more often with voice and gesture controlled machines, they expect the machines to recognize different emotions, and understand other high level communication features such as humor, sarcasm and intention. In order to make such communication possible, the machines need an empathy module in them, which is a software system that can extract emotions from human speech and behavior and can decide the correct response of the robot. Although research on empathetic robots is still in the primary stage, current methods involve using signal processing techniques, sentiment analysis and machine learning algorithms to make robots that can 'understand' human emotion. Other aspects of human-robot interaction include facial expression and gesture recognition, as well as robot movement to convey emotion and intent. We propose Zara the Supergirl as a prototype system of empathetic robots. It is a software-based virtual android, with an animated cartoon character to present itself on the screen. She will get 'smarter' and more empathetic, by having machine learning algorithms, and gathering more data and learning from it. In this paper, we present our work so far in the areas of deep learning of emotion and sentiment recognition, as well as humor recognition. We hope to explore the future direction of android development and how it can help improve people's lives.