A Review of Dialogue Systems: From Trained Monkeys to Stochastic Parrots (original) (raw)
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Adoption of messaging communication and voice assistants has grown rapidly in the last years. This creates a demand for tools that speed up prototyping of featurerich dialogue systems. An open-source library DeepPavlov is tailored for development of conversational agents. The library prioritises efficiency, modularity, and extensibility with the goal to make it easier to develop dialogue systems from scratch and with limited data available. It supports modular as well as end-to-end approaches to implementation of conversational agents. Conversational agent consists of skills and every skill can be decomposed into components. Components are usually models which solve typical NLP tasks such as intent classification, named entity recognition or pre-trained word vectors. Sequence-to-sequence chitchat skill, question answering skill or task-oriented skill can be assembled from components provided in the library.
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Dialogue systems have recently become a widely used system across the world. Some of the functionality offered includes application user interfacing, social conversation, data interaction, and task completion. Most recently, dialogue systems have been developed to autonomously and intelligently interact with users to complete complex tasks in diverse operational spaces. This kind of dialogue system can interact with users to complete tasks such as making a phone call, ordering items online, searching the internet for a question, and more. These systems are typically created by training a machine learning model with example conversational data. One of the existing problems with training these systems is that they require large amounts of realistic user data, which can be challenging to collect and label in large quantities. Our research focuses on modifications to user simulators that "change their mind" mid-episode with the goal of training more robust dialogue agents. We ...
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