PyOpenDial: A Python-based Domain-Independent Toolkit for Developing Spoken Dialogue Systems with Probabilistic Rules

Youngsoo Jang, Jongmin Lee, Jaeyoung Park, Kyeng-Hun Lee, Pierre Lison, Kee-Eung Kim


Abstract
We present PyOpenDial, a Python-based domain-independent, open-source toolkit for spoken dialogue systems. Recent advances in core components of dialogue systems, such as speech recognition, language understanding, dialogue management, and language generation, harness deep learning to achieve state-of-the-art performance. The original OpenDial, implemented in Java, provides a plugin architecture to integrate external modules, but lacks Python bindings, making it difficult to interface with popular deep learning frameworks such as Tensorflow or PyTorch. To this end, we re-implemented OpenDial in Python and extended the toolkit with a number of novel functionalities for neural dialogue state tracking and action planning. We describe the overall architecture and its extensions, and illustrate their use on an example where the system response model is implemented with a recurrent neural network.
Anthology ID:
D19-3032
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:
187–192
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-3032
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-3032
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Youngsoo Jang, Jongmin Lee, Jaeyoung Park, Kyeng-Hun Lee, Pierre Lison, and Kee-Eung Kim. 2019. PyOpenDial: A Python-based Domain-Independent Toolkit for Developing Spoken Dialogue Systems with Probabilistic Rules. 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 187–192, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
PyOpenDial: A Python-based Domain-Independent Toolkit for Developing Spoken Dialogue Systems with Probabilistic Rules (Jang et al., EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-3032.pdf