Action Selection for Interaction Management: Opportunities and Lessons for Automated Planning

The central problem in automated planning---action selection---is also a primary topic in the dialogue systems research community, however, the nature of research in that community is significantly different from that of planning, with a focus on end-to-end systems and user evaluations. In particular, numerous toolkits are available for developing speech-based dialogue systems that include not only a method for representing states and actions, but also a mechanism for reasoning and selecting the actions, often combined with a technical framework designed to simplify the task of creating end-to-end systems. We contrast this situation with that of automated planning, and argue that the dialogue systems community could benefit from some of the directions adopted by the planning community, and that there also exist opportunities and lessons for automated planning

Combining Expression and Content in Domains for Dialog Managers

We present work in progress on abstracting dialog managers from their domain in order to implement a dialog manager development tool which takes (among other data) a domain description as input and delivers a new dialog manager for the described domain as output. Thereby we will focus on two topics; firstly, the construction of domain descriptions with description logics and secondly, the interpretation of utterances in a given domain.Comment: 5 pages, uses conference.st

Modelling Users, Intentions, and Structure in Spoken Dialog

We outline how utterances in dialogs can be interpreted using a partial first order logic. We exploit the capability of this logic to talk about the truth status of formulae to define a notion of coherence between utterances and explain how this coherence relation can serve for the construction of AND/OR trees that represent the segmentation of the dialog. In a BDI model we formalize basic assumptions about dialog and cooperative behaviour of participants. These assumptions provide a basis for inferring speech acts from coherence relations between utterances and attitudes of dialog participants. Speech acts prove to be useful for determining dialog segments defined on the notion of completing expectations of dialog participants. Finally, we sketch how explicit segmentation signalled by cue phrases and performatives is covered by our dialog model.Comment: 17 page

Motivations, Classification and Model Trial of Conversational Agents for Insurance Companies

Advances in artificial intelligence have renewed interest in conversational agents. So-called chatbots have reached maturity for industrial applications. German insurance companies are interested in improving their customer service and digitizing their business processes. In this work we investigate the potential use of conversational agents in insurance companies by determining which classes of agents are of interest to insurance companies, finding relevant use cases and requirements, and developing a prototype for an exemplary insurance scenario. Based on this approach, we derive key findings for conversational agent implementation in insurance companies.Comment: 12 pages, 6 figure, accepted for presentation at The International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence 2019 (ICAART 2019