Athena 2.0: Contextualized Dialogue Management for an Alexa Prize SocialBot
This work addresses the problem of improving conversational AI for social interactions, though it appears incremental as it builds on previous versions.
The paper tackles the challenge of creating engaging and dynamic conversational AI by introducing Athena 2.0, a socialbot that uses a novel dialogue management strategy to generate unique conversations, achieving finalist status in the Alexa Prize Grand Challenges.
Athena 2.0 is an Alexa Prize SocialBot that has been a finalist in the last two Alexa Prize Grand Challenges. One reason for Athena's success is its novel dialogue management strategy, which allows it to dynamically construct dialogues and responses from component modules, leading to novel conversations with every interaction. Here we describe Athena's system design and performance in the Alexa Prize during the 20/21 competition. A live demo of Athena as well as video recordings will provoke discussion on the state of the art in conversational AI.