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 Personalized System for Conversational Recommendations

Searching for and making decisions about information is becoming increasingly difficult as the amount of information and number of choices increases. Recommendation systems help users find items of interest of a particular type, such as movies or restaurants, but are still somewhat awkward to use. Our solution is to take advantage of the complementary strengths of personalized recommendation systems and dialogue systems, creating personalized aides. We present a system -- the Adaptive Place Advisor -- that treats item selection as an interactive, conversational process, with the program inquiring about item attributes and the user responding. Individual, long-term user preferences are unobtrusively obtained in the course of normal recommendation dialogues and used to direct future conversations with the same user. We present a novel user model that influences both item search and the questions asked during a conversation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our system in significantly reducing the time and number of interactions required to find a satisfactory item, as compared to a control group of users interacting with a non-adaptive version of the system

Survey on Evaluation Methods for Dialogue Systems

In this paper we survey the methods and concepts developed for the evaluation of dialogue systems. Evaluation is a crucial part during the development process. Often, dialogue systems are evaluated by means of human evaluations and questionnaires. However, this tends to be very cost and time intensive. Thus, much work has been put into finding methods, which allow to reduce the involvement of human labour. In this survey, we present the main concepts and methods. For this, we differentiate between the various classes of dialogue systems (task-oriented dialogue systems, conversational dialogue systems, and question-answering dialogue systems). We cover each class by introducing the main technologies developed for the dialogue systems and then by presenting the evaluation methods regarding this class

On the voice-activated question answering

[EN] Question answering (QA) is probably one of the most challenging tasks in the field of natural language processing. It requires search engines that are capable of extracting concise, precise fragments of text that contain an answer to a question posed by the user. The incorporation of voice interfaces to the QA systems adds a more natural and very appealing perspective for these systems. This paper provides a comprehensive description of current state-of-the-art voice-activated QA systems. Finally, the scenarios that will emerge from the introduction of speech recognition in QA will be discussed. © 2006 IEEE.This work was supported in part by Research Projects TIN2009-13391-C04-03 and TIN2008-06856-C05-02. This paper was recommended by Associate Editor V. Marik.Rosso, P.; Hurtado Oliver, LF.; Segarra Soriano, E.; Sanchís Arnal, E. (2012). On the voice-activated question answering. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part C: Applications and Reviews. 42(1):75-85. https://doi.org/10.1109/TSMCC.2010.2089620S758542

Providing personalized Internet services by means of context-aware spoken dialogue systems

The widespread use of new mobile technology implementing wireless communications enables a new type of advanced applications to access information services on the Internet. In order to provide services which meet the user needs through intelligent information retrieval, the system must sense and interpret the user environment and the communication context. Though context-awareness is vital to provide services adapted to the user preferences, it cannot be useful if such services are difficult to access. The development of spoken dialogue systems for these applications facilitates interaction in natural language with the environment which is also benefited from contextual information. In this paper, we propose a framework to develop context-aware dialogue systems that dynamically incorporate user specific requirements and preferences as well as characteristics about the interaction environment, in order to improve and personalize web information and services. We have identified the major components for context-aware dialogue systems and placed them within a general-purpose architecture. The framework also describes a representation mode based on a dialogue register in order to share information between the elements of the architecture, and incorporates statistical methodologies for dialogue management in order to reduce the effort required for both the implementation of a new system and the adaptation to a new task. We have evaluated our proposal developing a travel-planning system, and provide a detailed discussion of its positive influence in the quality of the interaction and the information and services provided.Research funded by projects CICYT TIN2011- 28620-C02-01, CICYT TEC2011-28626-C02-02, CAM CONTEXTS (S2009/TIC-1485), and DPS2008- 07029-C02-02.Publicad

A Similar Legal Case Retrieval System by Multiple Speech Question and Answer

In real life, on the one hand people often lack legal knowledge and legal awareness; on the other hand lawyers are busy, timeconsuming, and expensive. As a result, a series of legal consultation problems cannot be properly handled. Although some legal robots can answer some problems about basic legal knowledge that are matched by keywords, they cannot do similar case retrieval and sentencing prediction according to the criminal facts described in natural language. To overcome the difficulty, we propose a similar case retrieval system based on natural language understanding. The system uses online speech synthesis of IFLYTEK and speech reading and writing technology, integrates natural language semantic processing technology and multiple rounds of question-and-answer dialogue mechanism to realise the legal knowledge question and answer with the memory-based context processing ability, and finally retrieves a case that is most similar to the criminal facts that the user consulted. After trial use, the system has a good level of human-computer interaction and high accuracy of information retrieval, which can largely satisfy people\u27s consulting needs for legal issues

Spoken dialogue systems: architectures and applications

171 p.Technology and technological devices have become habitual and omnipresent. Humans need to learn tocommunicate with all kind of devices. Until recently humans needed to learn how the devices expressthemselves to communicate with them. But in recent times the tendency has become to makecommunication with these devices in more intuitive ways. The ideal way to communicate with deviceswould be the natural way of communication between humans, the speech. Humans have long beeninvestigating and designing systems that use this type of communication, giving rise to the so-calledSpoken Dialogue Systems.In this context, the primary goal of the thesis is to show how these systems can be implemented.Additionally, the thesis serves as a review of the state-of-the-art regarding architectures and toolkits.Finally, the thesis is intended to serve future system developers as a guide for their construction. For that