Athena: Constructing Dialogues Dynamically with Discourse Constraints

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 ma...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:arXiv.org 2020-11
Main Authors: 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, Walker, Marilyn
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Computer architecture
Knowledge bases (artificial intelligence)
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary: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.
ISSN:2331-8422