Related papers: Gunrock: A Social Bot for Complex and Engaging Lon…
Gunrock 2.0 is built on top of Gunrock with an emphasis on user adaptation. Gunrock 2.0 combines various neural natural language understanding modules, including named entity detection, linking, and dialog act prediction, to improve user…
Conversational systems typically focus on functional tasks such as scheduling appointments or creating todo lists. Instead we design and evaluate SlugBot (SB), one of 8 semifinalists in the 2018 AlexaPrize, whose goal is to support casual…
We present Sounding Board, a social chatbot that won the 2017 Amazon Alexa Prize. The system architecture consists of several components including spoken language processing, dialogue management, language generation, and content management,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Conversational systems use spoken language to interact with their users. Although conversational systems, such as Amazon Alexa, are becoming common and afford interesting functionalities, there is little known about the issues users of…
In this paper we introduce a novel, open domain socialbot for the Amazon Alexa Prize competition, aimed at carrying on friendly conversations with users on a variety of topics. We present our modular system, highlighting our different data…
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…
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…
Conversational agents are exploding in popularity. However, much work remains in the area of non goal-oriented conversations, despite significant growth in research interest over recent years. To advance the state of the art in…
This paper describes the Tartan conversational agent built for the 2018 Alexa Prize Competition. Tartan is a non-goal-oriented socialbot focused around providing users with an engaging and fluent casual conversation. Tartan's key features…
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…
One of the most interesting aspects of the Amazon Alexa Prize competition is that the framing of the competition requires the development of new computational models of dialogue and its structure. Traditional computational models of…
Many open-domain dialogue systems rely on multiple response generators, any of which can contribute a response to the dialogue in a particular context. Thus the ability to compare potential responses and then select the best plays an…
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…