At present, bots are still in their preliminary stages of development. Many are relatively simple, or developed ad-hoc for a very specific use-case. For this reason, they are typically programmed manually, or utilize machine-learning classifiers to interpret a fixed set of user utterances. In reality, real world conversations with humans require support for dynamically capturing users expressions. Moreover, bots will derive immeasurable value by programming them to invoke APIs for their results. Today, within the Web and Mobile development community, complex applications are being stringed together with a few lines of code -all made possible by APIs. Yet, developers today are not as empowered to program bots in much the same way. To overcome this, we introduce BotBase, a bot programming platform that dynamically synthesizes natural language user expressions into API invocations. Our solution is two faceted: Firstly, we construct an API knowledge graph to encode and evolve APIs; secondly, leveraging the above we apply techniques in NLP, ML and Entity Recognition to perform the required synthesis from natural language user expressions into API calls.
Task-oriented virtual assistants (or simply chatbots) are in very high demand these days. They employ third-party APIs to serve end-users via natural language interactions. Chatbots are famed for their easy-to-use interface and gentle learning curve (it only requires one of humans' most innate ability, the use of natural language). Studies on human conversation patterns show, however, that day-today dialogues are of multi-turn and multi-intent nature, which pushes the need for chatbots that are more resilient and flexible to this style of conversations. In this paper, we propose the idea of leveraging Conversational State Machine to make it a core part of chatbots' conversation engine by formulating conversations as a sequence of states. Here, each state covers an intent and contains a nested state machine to help manage tasks associated to the conversation intent. Such enhanced conversation engine, together with a novel technique to spot implicit information from dialogues (by exploiting Dialog Acts), allows chatbots to manage tangled conversation situations where most existing chatbot technologies fail.
Building task-oriented bots requires mapping a user utterance to an intent with its associated entities to serve the request. Doing so is not easy since it requires large quantities of high-quality and diverse training data to learn how to map all possible variations of utterances with the same intent. Crowdsourcing may be an effective, inexpensive, and scalable technique for collecting such large datasets. However, the diversity of the results su ers from the priming e ect (i.e. workers are more likely to use the words in the sentence we are asking to paraphrase). In this paper, we leverage priming as an opportunity rather than a threat: we dynamically generate word suggestions to motivate crowd workers towards producing diverse utterances. The key challenge is to make suggestions that can improve diversity without resulting in semantically invalid paraphrases. To achieve this, we propose a probabilistic model that generates continuously improved versions of word suggestions that balance diversity and semantic relevance. Our experiments show that the proposed approach improves the diversity of crowdsourced paraphrases.
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