Automated Interactive Domain-Specific Conversational Agents that Understand Human Dialogs
It addresses the challenge of human-like communication in restricted domains like restaurant advising, but is incremental as it builds on the existing STAR framework.
The paper tackles the problem of enabling conversational agents to truly understand human dialogs by combining Large Language Models (LLMs) with Answer Set Programming (ASP) for commonsense reasoning, resulting in the AutoConcierge system that provides assuredly correct restaurant recommendations based on user preferences.
Achieving human-like communication with machines remains a classic, challenging topic in the field of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning and Natural Language Processing. These Large Language Models (LLMs) rely on pattern-matching rather than a true understanding of the semantic meaning of a sentence. As a result, they may generate incorrect responses. To generate an assuredly correct response, one has to "understand" the semantics of a sentence. To achieve this "understanding", logic-based (commonsense) reasoning methods such as Answer Set Programming (ASP) are arguably needed. In this paper, we describe the AutoConcierge system that leverages LLMs and ASP to develop a conversational agent that can truly "understand" human dialogs in restricted domains. AutoConcierge is focused on a specific domain-advising users about restaurants in their local area based on their preferences. AutoConcierge will interactively understand a user's utterances, identify the missing information in them, and request the user via a natural language sentence to provide it. Once AutoConcierge has determined that all the information has been received, it computes a restaurant recommendation based on the user-preferences it has acquired from the human user. AutoConcierge is based on our STAR framework developed earlier, which uses GPT-3 to convert human dialogs into predicates that capture the deep structure of the dialog's sentence. These predicates are then input into the goal-directed s(CASP) ASP system for performing commonsense reasoning. To the best of our knowledge, AutoConcierge is the first automated conversational agent that can realistically converse like a human and provide help to humans based on truly understanding human utterances.