Related papers: Athena: Constructing Dialogues Dynamically with Di…

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…

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…

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…

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…

There has recently been an explosion of work on spoken dialogue systems, along with an increased interest in open-domain systems that engage in casual conversations on popular topics such as movies, books and music. These systems aim to…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Athena is the ATLAS off-line software framework, based upon the GAUDI architecture from LHCb. As part of ATLAS' continuing efforts to enhance and customise the architecture to meet our needs, we have developed a data object description tool…

The third version of the open-domain dialogue system Alquist developed within the Alexa Prize 2020 competition is designed to conduct coherent and engaging conversations on popular topics. The main novel contribution is the introduction of…

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…

Due to emergent capabilities, large language models (LLMs) have been utilized as language-based agents to perform a variety of tasks and make decisions with an increasing degree of autonomy. These autonomous agents can understand high-level…

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…

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…

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…

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…

This is the application document for the 2019 Amazon Alexa competition. We give an overall vision of our conversational experience, as well as a sample conversation that we would like our dialog system to achieve by the end of the…