1. Athena: Constructing Dialogues Dynamically with Discourse Constraints
- Author
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Harrison, Vrindavan, Juraska, Juraj, Cui, Wen, Reed, Lena, Bowden, Kevin K., Wu, Jiaqi, Schwarzmann, Brian, Ebrahimi, Abteen, Rajasekaran, Rishi, Varghese, Nikhil, Wechsler-Azen, Max, Whittaker, Steve, Flanigan, Jeffrey, and Walker, Marilyn
- Subjects
Computer Science - Computation and Language - Abstract
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 principles of entity and topic coherence. Athena's dialogue manager uses a contract-based method where discourse constraints are dispatched to clusters of response generators. This allows Athena to procure responses from dynamic sources, such as knowledge graph traversals and feature-based on-the-fly response retrieval methods. After describing the dialogue system architecture, we perform an analysis of conversations that Athena participated in during the 2019 Alexa Prize Competition. We conclude with a report on several user studies we carried out to better understand how individual user characteristics affect system ratings., Comment: 3rd Proceedings of Alexa Prize (Alexa Prize 2019)
- Published
- 2020