Miroslav Vodolán

Christian Muise, Tathagata Chakraborti, Shubham Agarwal et al.

Generating complex multi-turn goal-oriented dialogue agents is a difficult problem that has seen a considerable focus from many leaders in the tech industry, including IBM, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. This is in large part due to the rapidly growing market demand for dialogue agents capable of goal-oriented behaviour. Due to the business process nature of these conversations, end-to-end machine learning systems are generally not a viable option, as the generated dialogue agents must be deployable and verifiable on behalf of the businesses authoring them. In this work, we propose a paradigm shift in the creation of goal-oriented complex dialogue systems that dramatically eliminates the need for a designer to manually specify a dialogue tree, which nearly all current systems have to resort to when the interaction pattern falls outside standard patterns such as slot filling. We propose a declarative representation of the dialogue agent to be processed by state-of-the-art planning technology. Our proposed approach covers all aspects of the process; from model solicitation to the execution of the generated plans/dialogue agents. Along the way, we introduce novel planning encodings for declarative dialogue synthesis, a variety of interfaces for working with the specification as a dialogue architect, and a robust executor for generalized contingent plans. We have created prototype implementations of all components, and in this paper, we further demonstrate the resulting system empirically.

Adi Botea, Christian Muise, Shubham Agarwal et al.

Dialogue systems have many applications such as customer support or question answering. Typically they have been limited to shallow single turn interactions. However more advanced applications such as career coaching or planning a trip require a much more complex multi-turn dialogue. Current limitations of conversational systems have made it difficult to support applications that require personalization, customization and context dependent interactions. We tackle this challenging problem by using domain-independent AI planning to automatically create dialogue plans, customized to guide a dialogue towards achieving a given goal. The input includes a library of atomic dialogue actions, an initial state of the dialogue, and a goal. Dialogue plans are plugged into a dialogue system capable to orchestrate their execution. Use cases demonstrate the viability of the approach. Our work on dialogue planning has been integrated into a product, and it is in the process of being deployed into another.

Miroslav Vodolán, Filip Jurčíček

This paper presents a novel task using real user data obtained in human-machine conversation. The task concerns with denotation extraction from answer hints collected interactively in a dialogue. The task is motivated by the need for large amounts of training data for question answering dialogue system development, where the data is often expensive and hard to collect. Being able to collect denotation interactively and directly from users, one could improve, for example, natural understanding components on-line and ease the collection of the training data. This paper also presents introductory results of evaluation of several denotation extraction models including attention-based neural network approaches.

Miroslav Vodolán, Rudolf Kadlec, Jan Kleindienst

This paper presents a hybrid dialog state tracker enhanced by trainable Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) for slot-filling dialog systems. Our architecture is inspired by previously proposed neural-network-based belief-tracking systems. In addition, we extended some parts of our modular architecture with differentiable rules to allow end-to-end training. We hypothesize that these rules allow our tracker to generalize better than pure machine-learning based systems. For evaluation, we used the Dialog State Tracking Challenge (DSTC) 2 dataset - a popular belief tracking testbed with dialogs from restaurant information system. To our knowledge, our hybrid tracker sets a new state-of-the-art result in three out of four categories within the DSTC2.

Miroslav Vodolán, Filip Jurčíček

This paper presents a dataset collected from natural dialogs which enables to test the ability of dialog systems to learn new facts from user utterances throughout the dialog. This interactive learning will help with one of the most prevailing problems of open domain dialog system, which is the sparsity of facts a dialog system can reason about. The proposed dataset, consisting of 1900 collected dialogs, allows simulation of an interactive gaining of denotations and questions explanations from users which can be used for the interactive learning.

Miroslav Vodolán, Rudolf Kadlec, Jan Kleindienst

This paper presents a hybrid dialog state tracker that combines a rule based and a machine learning based approach to belief state tracking. Therefore, we call it a hybrid tracker. The machine learning in our tracker is realized by a Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) network. To our knowledge, our hybrid tracker sets a new state-of-the-art result for the Dialog State Tracking Challenge (DSTC) 2 dataset when the system uses only live SLU as its input.