A Framework for Building Closed-Domain Chat Dialogue Systems
This work addresses the need for improved communication in human-dialogue system interactions by providing a framework for closed-domain chat systems, which is incremental as it builds on existing task-oriented dialogue approaches.
The authors tackled the problem of building closed-domain chat dialogue systems by introducing HRIChat, a framework that integrates domain-dependent language understanding and hybrid dialogue management, resulting in the development of FoodChatbot, which was evaluated in a user study and shown to enable reasonably good systems.
This paper presents HRIChat, a framework for developing closed-domain chat dialogue systems. Being able to engage in chat dialogues has been found effective for improving communication between humans and dialogue systems. This paper focuses on closed-domain systems because they would be useful when combined with task-oriented dialogue systems in the same domain. HRIChat enables domain-dependent language understanding so that it can deal well with domain-specific utterances. In addition, HRIChat makes it possible to integrate state transition network-based dialogue management and reaction-based dialogue management. FoodChatbot, which is an application in the food and restaurant domain, has been developed and evaluated through a user study. Its results suggest that reasonably good systems can be developed with HRIChat. This paper also reports lessons learned from the development and evaluation of FoodChatbot.