Athena 2.0: Discourse and User Modeling in Open Domain Dialogue
Omkar Patil Lena Reed Kevin K. Bowden Juraj Juraska Wen Cui Vrindavan Harrison Rishi Rajasekaran Angela Ramirez Cecilia Li Eduardo Zamora Phillip Lee Jeshwanth Bheemanpally Rohan Pandey Adwait Ratnaparkhi Marilyn Walker
Conversational agents are consistently growing in popularity and many people
interact with them every day. While many conversational agents act as personal
assistants, they can have many different goals. Some are task-oriented, such as
providing customer support for a bank or making a reservation. Others are
designed to be empathetic and to form emotional connections with the user. The
Alexa Prize Challenge aims to create a socialbot, which allows the user to
engage in coherent conversations, on a range of popular topics that will
interest the user. Here we describe Athena 2.0, UCSC's conversational agent for
Amazon's Socialbot Grand Challenge 4. Athena 2.0 utilizes a novel
knowledge-grounded discourse model that tracks the entity links that Athena
introduces into the dialogue, and uses them to constrain named-entity
recognition and linking, and coreference resolution. Athena 2.0 also relies on
a user model to personalize topic selection and other aspects of the
conversation to individual users.