On a Chatbot Providing Virtual Dialogues

Proceedings of Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing, pages 382–387, Varna, Bulgaria, Sep 2–4, 2019. https://doi.org/10.26615/978-954-452-056-4_045 382 1 On a Chatbot Providing Virtual Dialogues Boris Galitsky1, Dmitry Ilvovsky2, and Elizaveta Goncharova2 1Oracle Inc. Redwood Shores CA 2National Research University Higher School of Economics boris.galitsky@oracle.com; dilvovsky@hse.ru; egoncharova@hse.ru Abstract We present a chatbot that delivers content in the form of virtual dialogues automatically produced from the plain texts that are extracted and selected from the documents. This virtual dialogue content is provided in the form of answers derived from the found and selected documents split into fragments, and questions that are automatically generated for these answers based on the initial text. 1 Introduction Presentation of knowledge in dialogue format is a popular way to communicate information effectively. It has been demonstrated in games, news, commercials, and educational entertainment. Usability studies have shown that for information acquirers, dialogues often communicate information more effectively and persuade stronger than a monologue most of times (Cox et al., 1999, Craig et al., 2000). We demo a chatbot that delivers content in the form of virtual dialogues automatically produced from plain texts extracted and selected from documents. Given an initial query, this chatbot finds documents, extracts topics from them, organizes these topics in clusters according to conflicting viewpoints, receives from the user clarification on which cluster is most relevant to her opinion, and provides the content for this cluster. This content is provided in the form of a virtual dialogue where the answers are derived from the found and selected documents split into fragments, and questions are automatically generated for these answers. Once the proper piece of content is identified, users frequently like to consume it in the form of frequently asked question pages, discussion forums and blogs, rather then formal lengthy document. However, for the majority of knowledge domains, from legal and medical to engineering, most reliable information is only available as documents and web pages. Hence we convert plain documents into dialogues, imitating multiple people conversing on the specific topic of interest. A virtual dialogue is defined as a multi-turn dialogue between imaginary agents obtained as a result of content transformation. It is designed with the goal of effective information representation and is intended to look as close as possible to a genuine dialogue. Virtual dialogues as search results turn out to be more effective means of information access in comparison with original documents provided by a conventional chatbot or a search engine. 2 Related Systems Piwek et al. (2007) were pioneers of automated construction of dialogues, proposing Text2Dialogue system. The authors provided a theoretical foundation of the mapping that the system performs from RST structures to Dialogue representation structures. The authors introduced a number of requirements for a dialogue generation system (robustness, extensibility, and variation and control) and reported on the evaluation of the mapping rules. An important body of work concerns tutorial dialogue systems. Some of the work in that area focuses on authoring tools for generating questions, hints, and prompts. Typically, these …

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