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Recognising Flexible Intents and Multiple Domains in Extended Human-Robot Dialogues

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Advances in Artificial Intelligence (JSAI 2021)

Part of the book series: Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing ((AISC,volume 1423))

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Abstract

We focus on extended multi-turn multi-topic human-robot dialogues, which can be more challenging than short question-answering interactions. In earlier work we developed two dialogue systems for Nao robots: WikiTalk supporting Wikipedia-based dialogues on open-domain topics, and CityTalk supporting task-based dialogues on restaurant and hotel domains. We used WikiTalk with ERICA at Kyoto University, and now wish to make our systems available on multiple robot platforms. To support this aim we use Rasa open-source conversational AI, which creates transformer-based dialogue models that aim to recognise flexible intents in multi-turn multi-domain dialogues. To improve CityTalk we use Rasa knowledgebase actions backed by Neo4j graph databases which support knowledge graphs for multiple domains. By adding taxonomies and other semantic context to the knowledge graphs we aim to give more intelligent dialogue responses. We also plan to use the large MultiWOZ multi-domain dialogue dataset to support additional domains.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Multilingual WikiTalk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkMkImATfYQ.

  2. 2.

    ERICA and WikiTalk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aq4Rfwrktr0.

  3. 3.

    CityTalk Cambridge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWdd7kv5sX8.

  4. 4.

    CityTalk Tokyo 2020: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhjIJp8XBEA.

  5. 5.

    Rasa architecture figure: https://rasa.com/docs/rasa/arch-overview.

  6. 6.

    Rasa knowledgebase actions: https://rasa.com/docs/action-server/knowledge-bases.

  7. 7.

    MultiWOZ datasets: https://github.com/budzianowski/multiwoz.

  8. 8.

    MultiWOZ to Rasa conversion: https://github.com/RasaHQ/TED-paper.

References

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Acknowledgments

We thank Kristiina Jokinen (AI Research Center, AIST Tokyo Waterfront) for suggesting the use of Rasa conversational AI.

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Correspondence to Graham Wilcock .

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Wilcock, G. (2022). Recognising Flexible Intents and Multiple Domains in Extended Human-Robot Dialogues. In: Takama, Y., et al. Advances in Artificial Intelligence. JSAI 2021. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 1423. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96451-1_13

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