Paper Info
Title
Alexa Conversations: An Extensible Data-driven Approach for Building Task-oriented Dialogue Systems
Abstract
Traditional goal-oriented dialogue systems rely on various components such as natural language understanding, dialogue state tracking, policy learning and response generation. Training each component requires annotations which are hard to obtain for every new domain, limiting scalability of such systems. Similarly, rule-based dialogue systems require extensive writing and maintenance of rules and do not scale either. End-to-End dialogue systems, on the other hand, do not require module-specific annotations but need a large amount of data for training. To overcome these problems, in this demo, we present Alexa Conversations1, a new approach for building goal-oriented dialogue systems that is scalable, extensible as well as data efficient. The components of this system are trained in a data-driven manner, but instead of collecting annotated conversations for training, we generate them using a novel dialogue simulator based on a few seed dialogues and specifications of APIs and entities provided by the developer. Our approach provides outof-the-box support for natural conversational phenomena like entity sharing across turns or users changing their mind during conversation without requiring developers to provide any such dialogue flows. We exemplify our approach using a simple pizza ordering task and showcase its value in reducing the developer burden for creating a robust experience. Finally, we evaluate our system using a typical movie ticket booking task and show that the dialogue simulator is an essential component of the system that leads to over 50% improvement in turn-level action signature prediction accuracy.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.18653/v1/2021.naacl-demos.15
2021 CONFERENCE OF THE NORTH AMERICAN CHAPTER OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS: HUMAN LANGUAGE TECHNOLOGIES: DEMONSTRATIONS (NAACL-HLT 2021)
DocType
ISSN
Citations 
Conference
NAACL 2021 System Demonstrations Track
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
31
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Anish Acharya100.34
Suranjit Adhikari200.34
Sanchit Agarwal300.68
Vincent Auvray400.34
Nehal Belgamwar500.34
Arijit Biswas644.50
Shubhra Chandra700.34
Tagyoung Chung801.01
Maryam Fazel-Zarandi900.34
Raefer Gabriel1000.34
Shuyang Gao1101.01
Rahul Goel1200.34
Dilek Hakkani-Tür1328217.30
Jan Jezabek1400.34
Abhay Jha1500.34
Jiun-Yu Kao1600.34
Prakash Krishnan1700.34
Peter Ku1800.34
Anuj Goyal1900.34
Chien-Wei Lin2000.34
Qing Liu2100.34
Arindam Mandal2200.34
Angeliki Metallinou2324516.39
Vishal Naik2400.34
Yi Pan2500.34
Shachi Paul2600.34
Vittorio Perera27325.34
Abhishek Sethi2800.34
Minmin Shen2911.04
Nikko Strom3021.05
Eddie Wang3100.34