GRILLBot: A multi-modal conversational agent for complex real-world tasks

Carlos Gemmell, Federico Rossetto, Iain Mackie, Paul Owoicho, Sophie Fischer, Jeff Dalton


Abstract
We present GRILLBot, an open-source multi-modal task-oriented voice assistant to help users perform complex tasks, focusing on the domains of cooking and home improvement. GRILLBot curates and leverages web information extraction to build coverage over a broad range of tasks for which a user can receive guidance. To represent each task, we propose TaskGraphs as a dynamic graph unifying steps, requirements, and curated domain knowledge enabling contextual question answering, and detailed explanations. Multi-modal elements play a key role in GRILLBot both helping the user navigate through the task and enriching the experience with helpful videos and images that are automatically linked throughout the task. We leverage a contextual neural semantic parser to enable flexible navigation when interacting with the system by jointly encoding stateful information with the conversation history. GRILLBot enables dynamic and adaptable task planning and assistance for complex tasks by combining elements of task representations that incorporate text and structure, combined with neural models for search, question answering, and dialogue state management. GRILLBot competed in the Alexa prize TaskBot Challenge as one of the finalists.
Anthology ID:
2022.sigdial-1.63
Volume:
Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue
Month:
September
Year:
2022
Address:
Edinburgh, UK
Editors:
Oliver Lemon, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Junyi Jessy Li, Arash Ashrafzadeh, Daniel Hernández Garcia, Malihe Alikhani, David Vandyke, Ondřej Dušek
Venue:
SIGDIAL
SIG:
SIGDIAL
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
654–658
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.sigdial-1.63
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.sigdial-1.63
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Carlos Gemmell, Federico Rossetto, Iain Mackie, Paul Owoicho, Sophie Fischer, and Jeff Dalton. 2022. GRILLBot: A multi-modal conversational agent for complex real-world tasks. In Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, pages 654–658, Edinburgh, UK. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
GRILLBot: A multi-modal conversational agent for complex real-world tasks (Gemmell et al., SIGDIAL 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.sigdial-1.63.pdf