Emora STDM: A Versatile Framework for Innovative Dialogue System Development

James D. Finch, Jinho D. Choi


Abstract
This demo paper presents Emora STDM (State Transition Dialogue Manager), a dialogue system development framework that provides novel workflows for rapid prototyping of chat-based dialogue managers as well as collaborative development of complex interactions. Our framework caters to a wide range of expertise levels by supporting interoperability between two popular approaches, state machine and information state, to dialogue management. Our Natural Language Expression package allows seamless integration of pattern matching, custom NLP modules, and database querying, that makes the workflows much more efficient. As a user study, we adopt this framework to an interdisciplinary undergraduate course where students with both technical and non-technical backgrounds are able to develop creative dialogue managers in a short period of time.
Anthology ID:
2020.sigdial-1.32
Volume:
Proceedings of the 21th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue
Month:
July
Year:
2020
Address:
1st virtual meeting
Editors:
Olivier Pietquin, Smaranda Muresan, Vivian Chen, Casey Kennington, David Vandyke, Nina Dethlefs, Koji Inoue, Erik Ekstedt, Stefan Ultes
Venue:
SIGDIAL
SIG:
SIGDIAL
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
261–264
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.sigdial-1.32
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.sigdial-1.32
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
James D. Finch and Jinho D. Choi. 2020. Emora STDM: A Versatile Framework for Innovative Dialogue System Development. In Proceedings of the 21th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, pages 261–264, 1st virtual meeting. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Emora STDM: A Versatile Framework for Innovative Dialogue System Development (Finch & Choi, SIGDIAL 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.sigdial-1.32.pdf
Video:
 https://youtube.com/watch?v=GnxClvqoi-4
Code
 emora-chat/emora_stdm