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The interplay of a conversational ontology and AI planning for health dialogue management

Published: 22 April 2021 Publication History

Abstract

Health dialogue systems are required to respect some special requirements such as predictability and reliability. While knowledge based approaches still seem to be the most appropriate for these systems, the automated generation of reliable policies remains an open problem. This work proposes an approach that integrates a conversational ontology (Convology) and Artificial Intelligence planning with the aim of automating the generation of a dialogue manager capable of handling goal-oriented dialogues for the health domain. The resulting dialogue manager is aimed to be integrated into a suitable architecture that provides the natural language components. We illustrate our approach by describing how it has been implemented into PuffBot, a multi-turn goal-oriented conversational agent for supporting patients affected by asthma.

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cover image ACM Conferences
SAC '21: Proceedings of the 36th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing
March 2021
2075 pages
ISBN:9781450381048
DOI:10.1145/3412841
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 22 April 2021

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Author Tags

  1. automated planning
  2. conversational ontology
  3. dialogue management
  4. health dialogue

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SAC '21
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SAC '21: The 36th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing
March 22 - 26, 2021
Virtual Event, Republic of Korea

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Overall Acceptance Rate 1,650 of 6,669 submissions, 25%

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