Cogent: A Generic Dialogue System Shell Based on a Collaborative Problem Solving Model

Lucian Galescu, Choh Man Teng, James Allen, Ian Perera


Abstract
The bulk of current research in dialogue systems is focused on fairly simple task models, primarily state-based. Progress on developing dialogue systems for more complex tasks has been limited by the lack generic toolkits to build from. In this paper we report on our development from the ground up of a new dialogue model based on collaborative problem solving. We implemented the model in a dialogue system shell (Cogent) that al-lows developers to plug in problem-solving agents to create dialogue systems in new domains. The Cogent shell has now been used by several independent teams of researchers to develop dialogue systems in different domains, with varied lexicons and interaction style, each with their own problem-solving back-end. We believe this to be the first practical demonstration of the feasibility of a CPS-based dialogue system shell.
Anthology ID:
W18-5048
Volume:
Proceedings of the 19th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue
Month:
July
Year:
2018
Address:
Melbourne, Australia
Editors:
Kazunori Komatani, Diane Litman, Kai Yu, Alex Papangelis, Lawrence Cavedon, Mikio Nakano
Venue:
SIGDIAL
SIG:
SIGDIAL
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
400–409
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W18-5048
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W18-5048
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Lucian Galescu, Choh Man Teng, James Allen, and Ian Perera. 2018. Cogent: A Generic Dialogue System Shell Based on a Collaborative Problem Solving Model. In Proceedings of the 19th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue, pages 400–409, Melbourne, Australia. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Cogent: A Generic Dialogue System Shell Based on a Collaborative Problem Solving Model (Galescu et al., SIGDIAL 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W18-5048.pdf