Related papers: Modeling Performance in Open-Domain Dialogue with …
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…
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 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…
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…
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…
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…
This paper presents PARADISE (PARAdigm for DIalogue System Evaluation), a general framework for evaluating spoken dialogue agents. The framework decouples task requirements from an agent's dialogue behaviors, supports comparisons among…
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…
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…
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…
User engagement is a critical metric for evaluating the quality of open-domain dialogue systems. Prior work has focused on conversation-level engagement by using heuristically constructed features such as the number of turns and the total…
Building an open-domain conversational agent is a challenging problem. Current evaluation methods, mostly post-hoc judgments of static conversation, do not capture conversation quality in a realistic interactive context. In this paper, we…
Predicting user satisfaction in conversational systems has become critical, as spoken conversational assistants operate in increasingly complex domains. Online satisfaction prediction (i.e., predicting satisfaction of the user with the…
Evaluation of open-domain dialogue systems is highly challenging and development of better techniques is highlighted time and again as desperately needed. Despite substantial efforts to carry out reliable live evaluation of systems in…
An important aspect of developing dialogue systems is how to evaluate and compare the performance of different systems. Existing automatic evaluation metrics are based on turn-level quality evaluation and use average scores for system-level…
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…
As conversational AI-based dialogue management has increasingly become a trending topic, the need for a standardized and reliable evaluation procedure grows even more pressing. The current state of affairs suggests various evaluation…
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…
The amount of dialogue history to include in a conversational agent is often underestimated and/or set in an empirical and thus possibly naive way. This suggests that principled investigations into optimal context windows are urgently…
The applicability of common sentiment analysis models to open domain human robot interaction is investigated within this paper. The models are used on a dataset specific to user interaction with the Alana system (a Alexa prize system) in…