Introducing Brain-like Concepts to Embodied Hand-crafted Dialog Management System
This work addresses the challenge of building more seamless human-machine interfaces for dialog systems, though it appears incremental by combining existing approaches.
The paper tackled the problem of creating dialog systems by introducing brain-like concepts from neurobiology to reconcile hand-crafted design with neural networks, resulting in a neural behavior engine demonstrated in a virtual receptionist application.
Along with the development of chatbot, language models and speech technologies, there is a growing possibility and interest of creating systems able to interface with humans seamlessly through natural language or directly via speech. In this paper, we want to demonstrate that placing the research on dialog system in the broader context of embodied intelligence allows to introduce concepts taken from neurobiology and neuropsychology to define behavior architecture that reconcile hand-crafted design and artificial neural network and open the gate to future new learning approaches like imitation or learning by instruction. To do so, this paper presents a neural behavior engine that allows creation of mixed initiative dialog and action generation based on hand-crafted models using a graphical language. A demonstration of the usability of such brain-like inspired architecture together with a graphical dialog model is described through a virtual receptionist application running on a semi-public space.