Evorus: A Crowd-powered Conversational Assistant Built to Automate Itself Over Time

Crowd-powered conversational assistants have been shown to be more robust than automated systems, but do so at the cost of higher response latency and monetary costs. A promising direction is to combine the two approaches for high quality, low latency, and low cost solutions. In this paper, we introduce Evorus, a crowd-powered conversational assistant built to automate itself over time by (i) allowing new chatbots to be easily integrated to automate more scenarios, (ii) reusing prior crowd answers, and (iii) learning to automatically approve response candidates. Our 5-month-long deployment with 80 participants and 281 conversations shows that Evorus can automate itself without compromising conversation quality. Crowd-AI architectures have long been proposed as a way to reduce cost and latency for crowd-powered systems; Evorus demonstrates how automation can be introduced successfully in a deployed system. Its architecture allows future researchers to make further innovation on the underlying automated components in the context of a deployed open domain dialog system.Comment: 10 pages. To appear in the Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2018 (CHI'18

A Chatbot Framework for Yioop

Over the past few years, messaging applications have become more popular than Social networking sites. Instead of using a specific application or website to access some service, chatbots are created on messaging platforms to allow users to interact with companies’ products and also give assistance as needed. In this project, we designed and implemented a chatbot Framework for Yioop. The goal of the Chatbot Framework for Yioop project is to provide a platform for developers in Yioop to build and deploy chatbot applications. A chatbot is a web service that can converse with users using artificial intelligence in messaging platforms. Chatbots feel more like a human and it changes the interaction between people and computers. The Chatbot Framework enables developers to create chatbots and allows users to connect with them in the user chosen Yioop discussion channel. A developer can incorporate language skills within a chatbot by creating a knowledge base so that the chatbot understands user messages and reacts to them like a human. A knowledge base is created by using a language understanding web interface in Yioop