NIPS Conversational Intelligence Challenge 2017 Winner System: Skill-based Conversational Agent with Supervised Dialog Manager

Idris Yusupov, Yurii Kuratov


Abstract
We present bot#1337: a dialog system developed for the 1st NIPS Conversational Intelligence Challenge 2017 (ConvAI). The aim of the competition was to implement a bot capable of conversing with humans based on a given passage of text. To enable conversation, we implemented a set of skills for our bot, including chit-chat, topic detection, text summarization, question answering and question generation. The system has been trained in a supervised setting using a dialogue manager to select an appropriate skill for generating a response. The latter allows a developer to focus on the skill implementation rather than the finite state machine based dialog manager. The proposed system bot#1337 won the competition with an average dialogue quality score of 2.78 out of 5 given by human evaluators. Source code and trained models for the bot#1337 are available on GitHub.
Anthology ID:
C18-1312
Volume:
Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
August
Year:
2018
Address:
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
Editors:
Emily M. Bender, Leon Derczynski, Pierre Isabelle
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3681–3692
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/C18-1312
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Idris Yusupov and Yurii Kuratov. 2018. NIPS Conversational Intelligence Challenge 2017 Winner System: Skill-based Conversational Agent with Supervised Dialog Manager. In Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 3681–3692, Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
NIPS Conversational Intelligence Challenge 2017 Winner System: Skill-based Conversational Agent with Supervised Dialog Manager (Yusupov & Kuratov, COLING 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/C18-1312.pdf
Code
 sld/convai-bot-1337
Data
SQuAD