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The Alexa Prize program has empowered numerous university students to explore, experiment, and showcase their talents in building conversational agents through challenges like the SocialBot Grand Challenge and the TaskBot Challenge. As…
Bots are software systems designed to support users by automating a specific process, task, or activity. When such systems implement a conversational component to interact with the users, they are also known as conversational agents. Bots,…
Active listening is a well-known skill applied in human communication to build intimacy and elicit self-disclosure to support a wide variety of cooperative tasks. When applied to conversational UIs, active listening from machines can also…
The impact of user satisfaction in policy learning task-oriented dialogue systems has long been a subject of research interest. Most current models for estimating the user satisfaction either (i) treat out-of-context short-texts, such as…
Conversational Intelligence requires that a person engage on informational, personal and relational levels. Advances in Natural Language Understanding have helped recent chatbots succeed at dialog on the informational level. However,…
We present Viola, an open-domain dialogue system for spoken conversation that uses a topic-agnostic dialogue manager based on a simple generate-and-rank approach. Leveraging recent advances of generative dialogue systems powered by large…
Classifying the general intent of the user utterance in a conversation, also known as Dialogue Act (DA), e.g., open-ended question, statement of opinion, or request for an opinion, is a key step in Natural Language Understanding (NLU) for…
Modern conversational agents such as Alexa and Google Assistant represent significant progress in speech recognition, natural language processing, and speech synthesis. But as these agents have grown more realistic, concerns have been…
To build Sounding Board, we develop a system architecture that is capable of accommodating dialog strategies that we designed for socialbot conversations. The architecture consists of a multi-dimensional language understanding module for…
In this report, we describe the vision, challenges, and scientific contributions of the Task Wizard team, TWIZ, in the Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge 2022. Our vision, is to build TWIZ bot as an helpful, multimodal, knowledgeable, and…
Some robots can interact with humans using natural language, and identify service requests through human-robot dialog. However, few robots are able to improve their language capabilities from this experience. In this paper, we develop a…
This paper presents the design of the machine learning architecture that underlies the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) a large scale Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) Software Development Kit (SDK) that enables developers to extend the…
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…
For an interactive agent, such as task-oriented spoken dialog systems or chatbots, measuring and adapting to Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) is critical in order to understand user perception of an agent's behavior and increase user engagement…
We investigate users' perspectives on an online reflective question activity (RQA) that prompts people to externalize their underlying emotions on a troubling situation. Inspired by principles of cognitive behavioral therapy, our 15-minute…
This paper presents the slurk software, a lightweight interaction server for setting up dialog data collections and running experiments. Slurk enables a multitude of settings including text-based, speech and video interaction between two or…
Many businesses and consumers are extending the capabilities of voice-based services such as Amazon Alexa, Google Home, Microsoft Cortana, and Apple Siri to create custom voice experiences (also known as skills). As the number of these…
Context: The advent of Large Language Model-driven tools like ChatGPT offers software engineers an interactive alternative to community question-answering (CQA) platforms like Stack Overflow. While Stack Overflow provides benefits from the…
Training a spoken language understanding system, as the one in Alexa, typically requires a large human-annotated corpus of data. Manual annotations are expensive and time consuming. In Alexa Skill Kit (ASK) user experience with the skill…