Biblio

Our operational context is a task-oriented dialog system where no single module satisfactorily addresses the range of conversational queries from humans. Such systems must be equipped with a range of technologies to address semantic, factual, task-oriented, open domain conversations using rule-based, semantic-web, traditional machine learning and deep learning. This raises two key challenges. First, the modules need to be managed and selected appropriately. Second, the complexity of troubleshooting on such systems is high. We address these challenges with a mixed-initiative model that controls conversational logic through hierarchical classification. We also developed an interface to increase interpretability for operators and to aggregate module performance.

We will demonstrate a conversational products recommendation agent. This system shows how we combine research in personalized recommendation systems with research in dialogue systems to build a virtual sales agent. Based on new deep learning technologies we developed, the virtual agent is capable of learning how to interact with users, how to answer user questions, what is the next question to ask, and what to recommend when chatting with a human user. Normally a descent conversational agent for a particular domain requires tens of thousands of hand labeled conversational data or hand written rules. This is a major barrier when launching a conversation agent for a new domain. We will explore and demonstrate the effectiveness of the learning solution even when there is no hand written rules or hand labeled training data.