Chatbots are becoming increasingly popular in various industries, and thereare many options available for businesses and organisations. Several studieshave investigated open-source chatbots and identified their core strengths,implementation, and integration capabilities however few have investigatedopen-source chatbot frameworks and libraries in a specific use case such asmedicine. The project's objective was to evaluate a selection of chatbots ormore specifically two frameworks: Botkit and Rasa, and two libraries:ChatterBot, and Natural which was utilised together with Botkit and alanguage model which is DialoGPT. The evaluation focuses specifically onaccuracy, consistency, and response time. Frequently asked questions fromthe World Health Organization and COVID-19 related Dialogue Datasetfrom GitHub were utilised to test the chatbots' abilities in handling differentqueries and accuracy was measured through metrics like Jaccard similarity,bilingual evaluation understudy (BLEU), and recall oriented gistingevaluation (ROUGE) scores, consistency through Jaccard similarity betweenthe generated responses and response time was taken to be the average timefor a response in seconds. The analysis revealed unique strengths andlimitations for each chatbot model. Rasa displayed robust performance inaccuracy, consistency, and customisation capabilities if the chatbot works ina particular topic with acceptable response times. DialoGPT demonstratedstrong conversational abilities and contextually relevant responses withtrade-offs in consistency. ChatterBot showed consistency, though sometimesstruggled with advanced queries, and Botkit with Natural stood out for itsquick response times, albeit with limitations in accuracy and scalability.Despite implementation challenges, these open-source frameworks, libraries,and models offer promising solutions for organisations intending to harnessconversational agents' technology. The study suggests encouraging furtherexploration and refinement in this rapidly evolving field.

Text-to-SQL, which involves translating natural language into Structured Query Language (SQL), is crucial for enabling broad access to structured databases without expert knowledge. However, designing models for such tasks is challenging due to numerous factors, including the presence of ’noise,’ such as ambiguous questions and syntactical errors. This thesis provides an in-depth analysis of the distribution and types of noise in the widely used BIRD-Bench benchmark and the impact of noise on models. While BIRD-Bench was created to model dirty and noisy database values, it was not created to contain noise and errors in the questions and gold queries. We found after a manual evaluation that noise in questions and gold queries are highly prevalent in the financial domain of the dataset, and a further analysis of the other domains indicate the presence of noise in other parts as well. The presence of incorrect gold SQL queries, which then generate incorrect gold answers, has a significant impact on the benchmark’s reliability. Surprisingly, when evaluating models on corrected SQL queries, zero-shot baselines surpassed the performance of state-of-the-art prompting methods. The thesis then introduces the concept of classifying noise in natural language questions, aiming to prevent the entry of noisy questions into text-to-SQL models and to annotate noise in existing datasets. Experiments using GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 on a manually annotated dataset demonstrated the viability of this approach, with classifiers achieving up to 0.81 recall and 80% accuracy. Additionally, the thesis explored the use of LLMs for automatically correcting faulty SQL queries. This showed a 100% success rate for specific query corrections, highlighting the potential for LLMs in improving dataset quality. We conclude that informative noise labels and reliable benchmarks are crucial to developing new Text-to-SQL methods that can handle varying types of noise.

This thesis explores the opportunities and challenges of integrating recent Natural Language Processing (NLP) Artificial Intelligence (AI) advancements into IT project management and delivery (PM&D). Using a qualitative design through hermeneutic phenomenology strategy, the study employs a semi-systematic literature review and semi-structured interviews to delve into NLP AI's potential impacts in IT PM&D, from both theoretical and practical standpoints. The results revealed numerous opportunities for NLP AI application across Project Performance Domains, enhancing areas such as stakeholder engagement, team productivity, project planning, performance measurement, project work, delivery, and risk management. However, challenges were identified in areas including system integration, value definition, team and stakeholder-related issues, environmental considerations, and ethical concerns. In-house and third-party model usage also presented their unique set of challenges, emphasizing cost implications, data privacy and security, result quality, and dependence issues. The research concludes the immense potential of NLP AI in IT PM&D is tempered by these challenges, and calls for robust strategies, sound ethics, comprehensive training, new ROI evaluation frameworks, and responsible AI usage to effectively manage these issues. This thesis provides valuable insights to academics, practitioners, and decision-makers navigating the rapidly evolving landscape of NLP AI in IT PM&D.

In recent years, artificial intelligence (AI) has become increasingly popular. An area where AI technology is used and has received much attention during the past year is chatbots. They can simulate an understanding of human language and form text responses to questions asked. Apart from generating text responses, they can also generate programming code, making them useful for tasks such as testing. Although testing is considered a crucial part of software development, many find it tedious and time-consuming. There are currently limited AI-powered tools for generating unit tests in general and even fewer for the programming language Java. The thesis tackles the problem of the lack of tools for generating unit tests in Java that explore the capabilities of AI, and a research question is introduced thereafter. The purpose of this thesis is to address the issue by creating a prototype for generating unit tests in Java based on the AI model, GPT-3.5-Turbo. The goal is to provide a basis for other professionals to create tools for generating unit tests, which was done by experimenting with different prompts and values of a randomness parameter and then suggesting the prototype JUTAI. A quantitative research method with an experimental and comparative approach was used to evaluate the results. A comparison model with three criteria was brought forward to evaluate the results. The findings reveal that JUTAI outperformed the general-purpose AI tool, ChatGPT, across all three criteria and indicate that the goal of this thesis is achieved and the research question answered. / Intresset för artificiell intelligens (AI) har ökat de senaste åren. Ett område där AI- teknologi används och som har fått mycket uppmärksamhet under det senaste året är chattbottar. De kan simulera en förståelse för mänskligt språk och svara på frågor i textformat. Utöver det kan de även generera programkod. Tack vare förmågan att generera kod kan de användas för testning. Även om testning anses vara en viktig del av mjukvaruutveckling, tycker många att det är tråkigt och tidskrävande. För närvarande finns det ett begränsat antal verktyg som kan generera enhetstester, och det finns ännu färre verktyg som kan göra detta i Java. Detta examensarbete tog sig an problemet med bristen på AI-verktyg för enhetstestning i Java genom att besvara på forskningsfrågan som ställdes. Syftet med examensarbetet är att föreslå en lösning på problemet genom att utveckla en prototyp som använder sig av AI- modellen GPT-3.5-Turbo för att generera enhetstester i Java. Målet är att ge en grund för andra yrkesverksamma att skapa verktyg för att generera enhetstester, vilket gjordes genom att experimentera med olika instruktionstrukturer och värden för en slumpmässighetsparameter, och sedan föreslå protypen JUTAI. En kvantitativ forskningsmetod tillsammans med en experimentell och jämförande ansats användes för att utvärdera resultaten. En jämförelsemodell med tre kriterier togs fram för att utvärdera resultaten. Resultaten visar att JUTAI presterade bättre än AI-verktyget ChatGPT i de tre kriterierna och indikerar att målet med detta examensarbete uppnåddes och forskningsfrågan besvarades.

Auto-completion is a task that requires an algorithm to give suggestions for completing sentences. Specifically, the history of live chat and the words already typed by the agents are provided to the algorithm for outputting the suggestions to finish the sentences. This study aimed to investigate if the above task can be handled by fine-tuning a pre-trained T5 model on the target dataset. In this thesis, both an English and a Portuguese dataset were selected. Then, T5 and its multilingual version mT5were fine-tuned on the target datasets. The models were evaluated with different metrics (log perplexity, token level accuracy, and multi-word level accuracy), and the results are compared to those of the baseline methods. The results on these different metrics show that a method based on pre-trained T5 is a promising approach to handle the target task. / Automatisk komplettering är en uppgift som kräver en algoritm för att ge förslag på hur man kan slutföra meningar. Specifikt levereras historien om livechatt och de ord som redan har skrivits av agenterna till algoritmen för att mata ut förslagen för att avsluta meningarna. Denna studie syftade till att undersöka om ovanstående uppgift kan hanteras genom att finjustera en förtränad T5-modell på måldatamängden. I denna avhandling valdes både en engelsk och en portugisisk datamängd. Därefter finjusterades T5 och dess flerspråkiga version mT5 på måldatauppsättningarna. Modellerna utvärderades med olika mätvärden (log-perplexitet, precision på ordnivå och flerordsnivå), och resultaten jämförs med baslinjemetoderna. Resultaten på dessa olika mätvärden visar att en metod baserad på en förtränad T5 är ett lovande tillvägagångssätt för att hantera uppgiften.

<p dir="ltr">Semantic pairs, which consist of related entities or concepts, serve as the foundation for comprehending the meaning of language in both written and spoken forms. These pairs enable to grasp the nuances of relationships between words, phrases, or ideas, forming the basis for more advanced language tasks like entity recognition, sentiment analysis, machine translation, and question answering. They allow to infer causality, identify hierarchies, and connect ideas within a text, ultimately enhancing the depth and accuracy of automated language processing.</p><p dir="ltr">Nevertheless, the task of extracting semantic pairs from sentences poses a significant challenge, necessitating the relevance of syntactic dependency patterns (SDPs). Thankfully, semantic relationships exhibit adherence to distinct SDPs when connecting pairs of entities. Recognizing this fact underscores the critical importance of extracting these SDPs, particularly for specific semantic relationships like hyponym-hypernym, meronym-holonym, and cause-effect associations. The automated extraction of such SDPs carries substantial advantages for various downstream applications, including entity extraction, ontology development, and question answering. Unfortunately, this pivotal facet of pattern extraction has remained relatively overlooked by researchers in the domains of natural language processing (NLP) and information retrieval.</p><p dir="ltr">To address this gap, I introduce an attention-based supervised deep learning model, ASPER. ASPER is designed to extract SDPs that denote semantic relationships between entities within a given sentential context. I rigorously evaluate the performance of ASPER across three distinct semantic relations: hyponym-hypernym, cause-effect, and meronym-holonym, utilizing six datasets. My experimental findings demonstrate ASPER's ability to automatically identify an array of SDPs that mirror the presence of these semantic relationships within sentences, outperforming existing pattern extraction methods by a substantial margin.</p><p dir="ltr">Second, I want to use the SDPs to extract semantic pairs from sentences. I choose to extract cause-effect entities from medical literature. This task is instrumental in compiling various causality relationships, such as those between diseases and symptoms, medications and side effects, and genes and diseases. Existing solutions excel in sentences where cause and effect phrases are straightforward, such as named entities, single-word nouns, or short noun phrases. However, in the complex landscape of medical literature, cause and effect expressions often extend over several words, stumping existing methods, resulting in incomplete extractions that provide low-quality, non-informative, and at times, conflicting information. To overcome this challenge, I introduce an innovative unsupervised method for extracting cause and effect phrases, PatternCausality tailored explicitly for medical literature. PatternCausality employs a set of cause-effect dependency patterns as templates to identify the key terms within cause and effect phrases. It then utilizes a novel phrase extraction technique to produce comprehensive and meaningful cause and effect expressions from sentences. Experiments conducted on a dataset constructed from PubMed articles reveal that PatternCausality significantly outperforms existing methods, achieving a remarkable order of magnitude improvement in the F-score metric over the best-performing alternatives. I also develop various PatternCausality variants that utilize diverse phrase extraction methods, all of which surpass existing approaches. PatternCausality and its variants exhibit notable performance improvements in extracting cause and effect entities in a domain-neutral benchmark dataset, wherein cause and effect entities are confined to single-word nouns or noun phrases of one to two words.</p><p dir="ltr">Nevertheless, PatternCausality operates within an unsupervised framework and relies heavily on SDPs, motivating me to explore the development of a supervised approach. Although SDPs play a pivotal role in semantic relation extraction, pattern-based methodologies remain unsupervised, and the multitude of potential patterns within a language can be overwhelming. Furthermore, patterns do not consistently capture the broader context of a sentence, leading to the extraction of false-positive semantic pairs. As an illustration, consider the hyponym-hypernym pattern <i>the w of u</i> which can correctly extract semantic pairs for a sentence like <i>the village of Aasu</i> but fails to do so for the phrase <i>the moment of impact</i>. The root cause of this limitation lies in the pattern's inability to capture the nuanced meaning of words and phrases in a sentence and their contextual significance. These observations have spurred my exploration of a third model, DepBERT which constitutes a dependency-aware supervised transformer model. DepBERT's primary contribution lies in introducing the underlying dependency structure of sentences to a language model with the aim of enhancing token classification performance. To achieve this, I must first reframe the task of semantic pair extraction as a token classification problem. The DepBERT model can harness both the tree-like structure of dependency patterns and the masked language architecture of transformers, marking a significant milestone, as most large language models (LLMs) predominantly focus on semantics and word co-occurrence while neglecting the crucial role of dependency architecture.</p><p dir="ltr">In summary, my overarching contributions in this thesis are threefold. First, I validate the significance of the dependency architecture within various components of sentences and publish SDPs that incorporate these dependency relationships. Subsequently, I employ these SDPs in a practical medical domain to extract vital cause-effect pairs from sentences. Finally, my third contribution distinguishes this thesis by integrating dependency relations into a deep learning model, enhancing the understanding of language and the extraction of valuable semantic associations.</p>

[pt] No contexto de comércio eletrônico, descrições de produtos exercem grande influência na experiência de compra. Descrições bem feitas devem idealmente informar um potencial consumidor sobre detalhes relevantes do produto, esclarecendo potenciais dúvidas e facilitando a compra. Gerar boas descrições, entretanto, é uma atividade custosa, que tradicionalmente exige esforço humano. Ao mesmo tempo, existe uma grande quantidade de produtos sendo lançados a cada dia. Nesse contexto, este trabalho apresenta uma nova metodologia para a geração automatizada de descrições de produtos, usando as avaliações deixadas por usuários como fonte de informações. O método proposto é composto por três etapas: (i) a extração de sentenças adequadas para uma descrição a partir das avaliações (ii) a seleção de sentenças dentre as candidatas (iii) a geração da descrição de produto a partir das sentenças selecionadas usando um Large Language Model (LLM) de forma zero-shot. Avaliamos a qualidade das descrições geradas pelo nosso método comparando-as com descrições de produto reais postadas pelos próprios anunciantes. Nessa avaliação, contamos com a colaboração de 30 avaliadores, e verificamos que nossas descrições são preferidas mais vezes do que as descrições originais, sendo consideradas mais informativas, legíveis e relevantes. Além disso, nessa mesma avaliação replicamos um método da literatura recente e executamos um teste estatístico comparando seus resultados com o nosso método, e dessa comparação verificamos que nosso método gera descrições mais informativas e preferidas no geral. / [en] In the context of e-commerce, product descriptions have a great influence on the shopping experience. Well-made descriptions should ideally inform a potential consumer about relevant product details, clarifying potential doubt sand facilitating the purchase. Generating good descriptions, however, is a costly activity, which traditionally requires human effort. At the same time, there are a large number of products being launched every day. In this context, this work presents a new methodology for the automated generation of product descriptions, using reviews left by users as a source of information. The proposed method consists of three steps: (i) the extraction of suitable sentences for a description from the reviews (ii) the selection of sentences among the candidates (iii) the generation of the product description from the selected sentences using a Large Language Model (LLM) in a zero-shot way. We evaluate the quality of descriptions generated by our method by comparing them to real product descriptions posted by sellers themselves. In this evaluation, we had the collaboration of 30 evaluators, and we verified that our descriptions are preferred more often than the original descriptions, being considered more informative, readable and relevant. Furthermore, in this same evaluation we replicated a method from recent literature and performed a statistical test comparing its results with our method, and from this comparison we verified that our method generates more informative and preferred descriptions overall.

Sensitive data leaking from a system can have tremendous negative consequences, such as discrimination, social stigma, and fraudulent economic consequences for those whose data has been leaked. Therefore, it’s of utmost importance that sensitive data is not leaked from a system. This thesis investigated different methods to prevent sensitive patient data from leaking in a machine learning system. Various methods have been investigated and evaluated based on previous research; the methods used in this thesis are a large language model (LLM) for code analysis and a membership inference attack on models to test their privacy level. The LLM code analysis results show that the Llama 3 (an LLM) model had an accuracy of 90% in identifying malicious code that attempts to steal sensitive patient data. The model analysis can evaluate and determine membership inference of sensitive patient data used for training in machine learning models, which is essential for determining data leakage a machine learning model can pose in machine learning systems. Further studies in increasing the deterministic and formatting of the LLM‘s responses must be investigated to ensure the robustness of the security system that utilizes LLMs before it can be deployed in a production environment. Further studies of the model analysis can apply a wider variety of evaluations, such as increased size of machine learning model types and increased range of attack testing types of machine learning models, which can be implemented into machine learning systems. / Känsliga data som läcker från ett system kan ha enorma negativa konsekvenser, såsom diskriminering, social stigmatisering och negativa ekonomiska konsekvenser för dem vars data har läckt ut. Därför är det av yttersta vikt att känsliga data inte läcker från ett system. Denna avhandling undersökte olika metoder för att förhindra att känsliga patientdata läcker ut ur ett maskininlärningssystem. Olika metoder har undersökts och utvärderats baserat på tidigare forskning; metoderna som användes i denna avhandling är en stor språkmodell (LLM) för kodanalys och en medlemskapsinfiltrationsattack på maskininlärnings (ML) modeller för att testa modellernas integritetsnivå. Kodanalysresultaten från LLM visar att modellen Llama 3 hade en noggrannhet på 90% i att identifiera skadlig kod som försöker stjäla känsliga patientdata. Modellanalysen kan utvärdera och bestämma medlemskap av känsliga patientdata som används för träning i maskininlärningsmodeller, vilket är avgörande för att bestämma den dataläckage som en maskininlärningsmodell kan exponera. Ytterligare studier för att öka determinismen och formateringen av LLM:s svar måste undersökas för att säkerställa robustheten i säkerhetssystemet som använder LLM:er innan det kan driftsättas i en produktionsmiljö. Vidare studier av modellanalysen kan tillämpa ytterligare bredd av utvärderingar, såsom ökad storlek på maskininlärningsmodelltyper och ökat utbud av attacktesttyper av maskininlärningsmodeller som kan implementeras i maskininlärningssystem.

Manuell granskning av användarrecensioner för att extrahera relevant informationkan vara en tidskrävande process. Denna rapport har undersökt om stora språkmodeller kan användas för att sammanfatta, extrahera och analysera nyckelinformation från recensioner, samt hur en sådan applikation kan konstrueras.  Det visade sig att olika modeller presterade olika bra beroende på mätvärden ochviktning mellan recall och precision. Vidare visade det sig att fine-tuning av språkmodeller som Llama 3 förbättrade prestationen vid klassifikation av användbara recensioner och ledde, enligt vissa mätvärden, till högre prestation än större språkmodeller som Chat-Bison. För engelskt översatta recensioner hade Llama 3:8b:Instruct, Chat-Bison samt den fine-tunade versionen av Llama 3:8b ett F4-makro-score på 0.89, 0.90 och 0.91 respektive. Ytterligare ett resultat är att de större modellerna Chat-Bison, Text-Bison och Gemini, presterade bättre i fallet för generering av sammanfattande texter, än de mindre modeller som testades vid inmatning av flertalet recensioner åt gången.  Generellt sett presterade språkmodellerna också bättre om recensioner först översattes till engelska innan bearbetning, snarare än då recensionerna var skrivna i originalspråk där de majoriteten av recensionerna var skrivna på svenska. En annan lärdom från förbearbetning av recensioner är att antal anrop till dessa språkmodeller kan minimeras genom att filtrera utifrån ordlängd och betyg.  Utöver språkmodeller visade resultaten att användningen av vektordatabaser och embeddings kan ge en större överblick över användbara recensioner genom vektordatabasers inbyggda förmåga att hitta semantiska likheter och samla liknande recensioner i kluster. / Manually reviewing user reviews to extract relevant information can be a time consuming process. This report investigates if large language models can be used to summarize, extract, and analyze key information from reviews, and how such anapplication can be constructed.  It was discovered that different models exhibit varying degrees of performance depending on the metrics and the weighting between recall and precision. Furthermore, fine-tuning of language models such as Llama 3 was found to improve performance in classifying useful reviews and, according to some metrics, led to higher performance than larger language models like Chat-bison. Specifically, for English translated reviews, Llama 3:8b:Instruct, Chat-bison, and Llama 3:8b fine-tuned had an F4 macro score 0.89, 0.90, 0.91 respectively. A further finding is that the larger models, Chat-Bison, Text-Bison, and Gemini performed better than the smaller models that was tested, when inputting multiple reviews at a time in the case of summary text generation.  In general, language models performed better if reviews were first translated into English before processing rather than when reviews were written in the original language where most reviews were written in Swedish. Additionally, another insight from the pre-processing phase, is that the number of API-calls to these language models can be minimized by filtering based on word length and rating. In addition to findings related to language models, the results also demonstrated that the use of vector databases and embeddings can provide a greater overview of reviews by leveraging the databases’ built-in ability to identify semantic similarities and cluster similar reviews together.

This study introduces an automated evaluation method for large language model (LLM) based chatbots in educational settings, utilizing LLM-as-a-Judge to assess their performance. Our results demonstrate the efficacy of this approach in evaluating the accuracy of three LLM-based chatbots (Llama 3 70B, ChatGPT 4, Gemini Advanced) across two subjects: history and biology. The analysis reveals promising performance across different subjects. On a scale from 1 to 5 describing the correctness of the judge itself, the LLM judge’s average scores for correctness when evaluating each chatbot on history related questions are 3.92 (Llama 3 70B), 4.20 (ChatGPT 4), 4.51 (Gemini Advanced); for biology related questions, the average scores are 4.04 (Llama 3 70B), 4.28 (ChatGPT 4), 4.09 (Gemini Advanced). This underscores the potential of leveraging the LLM-as-a-judge strategy to evaluate the correctness of responses from other LLMs.