Agent Simulation to Develop Interactive and User-Centered Conversational Agents

Proceedings of: International Symposium on Distributed Computing and Artificial Intelligence (DCAI 2011). Salamanca, 06-08 April 2011.In this paper, we present a technique for developing user simulators which are able to interact and evaluate conversational agents. Our technique is based on a statistical model that is automatically learned from a dialog corpus. This model is used by the user simulator to provide the following answer taking into account the complete history of the interaction. The main objective of our proposal is not only to evaluate the conversational agent, but also to improve this agent by employing the simulated dialogs to learn a better dialog model. We have applied this technique to design and evaluate a conversational agent which provides academic information in a multi-agent system. The results of the evaluation show that the conversational agent reduces the time needed to fulfill to complete the the dialogs, thereby allowing the conversational agent to tackle new situations and generate new coherent answers for the situations already present in an initial model.Funded by projects CICYT TIN2008-06742-C02-02/TSI, CICYT TEC2008-06732-C02- 02/TEC, CAM CONTEXTS (S2009/TIC-1485), and DPS2008-07029-C02-02.Publicad

Don't Believe The Hype!:White Lies of Conversational User Interface Creation Tools

The 2nd International Conference on Conversational User Interfaces (CUI 2020), Bilbao, Spain, 23-24 July 2020Following the initial hype and high expectations of conversational user interfaces (CUIs), a number of creation tools have emerged to simplify development of these complex systems. These have the potential to democratise and expand application development to those without programming skills. However, while such tools allow end-user developers to build language understanding and dialog management capability into a CUI application, actually fulfilling or executing an action still requires programmatic API integration. In this paper, we look at how CUI builders that claim to be ``no code required'' struggle to yield more than toy examples, with an aim to provoke the community to develop better tools for CUI creation.Trinity College Dublin (TCD