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In this paper, we present our Alexa Prize Grand Challenge 4 socialbot: Proto. Leveraging diverse sources of world knowledge, and powered by a suite of neural and rule-based natural language understanding modules, state-of-the-art neural…
Athena 2.0 is an Alexa Prize SocialBot that has been a finalist in the last two Alexa Prize Grand Challenges. One reason for Athena's success is its novel dialogue management strategy, which allows it to dynamically construct dialogues and…
This report describes Athena, a dialogue system for spoken conversation on popular topics and current events. We develop a flexible topic-agnostic approach to dialogue management that dynamically configures dialogue based on general…
Conversational agents are consistently growing in popularity and many people interact with them every day. While many conversational agents act as personal assistants, they can have many different goals. Some are task-oriented, such as…
We present Edina, the University of Edinburgh's social bot for the Amazon Alexa Prize competition. Edina is a conversational agent whose responses utilize data harvested from Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) through an innovative new technique…
Building open domain conversational systems that allow users to have engaging conversations on topics of their choice is a challenging task. Alexa Prize was launched in 2016 to tackle the problem of achieving natural, sustained, coherent…
There has been an increased focus on creating conversational open-domain dialogue systems in the spoken dialogue community. Unlike traditional dialogue systems, these conversational systems cannot assume any specific information need or…
We present TacoBot, a task-oriented dialogue system built for the inaugural Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge, which assists users in completing multi-step cooking and home improvement tasks. TacoBot is designed with a user-centered principle…
Open-domain social dialogue is one of the long-standing goals of Artificial Intelligence. This year, the Amazon Alexa Prize challenge was announced for the first time, where real customers get to rate systems developed by leading…
Since its inception in 2016, the Alexa Prize program has enabled hundreds of university students to explore and compete to develop conversational agents through the SocialBot Grand Challenge. The goal of the challenge is to build agents…
This paper presents the second version of the dialogue system named Alquist competing in Amazon Alexa Prize 2018. We introduce a system leveraging ontology-based topic structure called topic nodes. Each of the nodes consists of several…
The greatest challenges in building sophisticated open-domain conversational agents arise directly from the potential for ongoing mixed-initiative multi-turn dialogues, which do not follow a particular plan or pursue a particular fixed…
This paper describes a new open domain dialogue system Alquist developed as part of the Alexa Prize competition for the Amazon Echo line of products. The Alquist dialogue system is designed to conduct a coherent and engaging conversation on…
Dialog evaluation is a challenging problem, especially for non task-oriented dialogs where conversational success is not well-defined. We propose to evaluate dialog quality using topic-based metrics that describe the ability of a…
Conversational agents are exploding in popularity. However, much work remains in the area of social conversation as well as free-form conversation over a broad range of domains and topics. To advance the state of the art in conversational…
Personal assistant systems, such as Apple Siri, Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, and Microsoft Cortana, are becoming ever more widely used. Understanding user intent such as clarification questions, potential answers and user feedback in…
Traditional goal-oriented dialogue systems rely on various components such as natural language understanding, dialogue state tracking, policy learning and response generation. Training each component requires annotations which are hard to…
This paper introduces Miutsu, National Taiwan University's Alexa Prize TaskBot, which is designed to assist users in completing tasks requiring multiple steps and decisions in two different domains -- home improvement and cooking. We…
We report on the design and development of the CASPR system, a socialbot designed to compete in the Amazon Alexa Socialbot Challenge 4. CASPR's distinguishing characteristic is that it will use automated commonsense reasoning to truly…
The overall objective of 'social' dialogue systems is to support engaging, entertaining, and lengthy conversations on a wide variety of topics, including social chit-chat. Apart from raw dialogue data, user-provided ratings are the most…