Gunrock: A Social Bot for Complex and Engaging Long Conversations

Dian Yu, Michelle Cohn, Yi Mang Yang, Chun Yen Chen, Weiming Wen, Jiaping Zhang, Mingyang Zhou, Kevin Jesse, Austin Chau, Antara Bhowmick, Shreenath Iyer, Giritheja Sreenivasulu, Sam Davidson, Ashwin Bhandare, Zhou Yu


Abstract
Gunrock is the winner of the 2018 Amazon Alexa Prize, as evaluated by coherence and engagement from both real users and Amazon-selected expert conversationalists. We focus on understanding complex sentences and having in-depth conversations in open domains. In this paper, we introduce some innovative system designs and related validation analysis. Overall, we found that users produce longer sentences to Gunrock, which are directly related to users’ engagement (e.g., ratings, number of turns). Additionally, users’ backstory queries about Gunrock are positively correlated to user satisfaction. Finally, we found dialog flows that interleave facts and personal opinions and stories lead to better user satisfaction.
Anthology ID:
D19-3014
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP): System Demonstrations
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Editors:
Sebastian Padó, Ruihong Huang
Venues:
EMNLP | IJCNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
79–84
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-3014
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-3014
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Dian Yu, Michelle Cohn, Yi Mang Yang, Chun Yen Chen, Weiming Wen, Jiaping Zhang, Mingyang Zhou, Kevin Jesse, Austin Chau, Antara Bhowmick, Shreenath Iyer, Giritheja Sreenivasulu, Sam Davidson, Ashwin Bhandare, and Zhou Yu. 2019. Gunrock: A Social Bot for Complex and Engaging Long Conversations. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP): System Demonstrations, pages 79–84, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Gunrock: A Social Bot for Complex and Engaging Long Conversations (Yu et al., EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-3014.pdf