This paper presents a conversational AI platform called Flowstorm. Flowstorm is an open-source SaaS project suitable for creating, running, and analyzing conversational applications. Thanks to the fast and fully automated build process, the dialogues created within the platform can be executed in seconds. Furthermore, we propose a novel dialogue architecture that uses a combination of tree structures with generative models. The tree structures are also used for training NLU models suitable for specific dialogue scenarios. However, the generative models are globally used across applications and extend the functionality of the dialogue trees. Moreover, the platform functionality benefits from out-of-the-box components, such as the one responsible for extracting data from utterances or working with crawled data. Additionally, it can be extended using a custom code directly in the platform. One of the essential features of the platform is the possibility to reuse the created assets across applications. There is a library of prepared assets where each developer can contribute. All of the features are available through a user-friendly visual editor.

We introduce BotSIM, a modular, open-source Bot SIMulation environment with dialog generation, user simulation and conversation analytics capabilities. BotSIM aims to serve as a one-stop solution for large-scale data-efficient end-to-end evaluation, diagnosis and remediation of commercial task-oriented dialog (TOD) systems to significantly accelerate commercial bot development and evaluation, reduce cost and time-to-market. BotSIM adopts a layered design comprising the infrastructure layer, the adaptor layer and the application layer. The infrastructure layer hosts key models and components to support BotSIM's major functionalities via a streamlined "generation-simulation-remediation" pipeline. The adaptor layer is used to extend BotSIM to accommodate new bot platforms. The application layer provides a suite of command line tools and a Web App to significantly lower the entry barrier for BotSIM users such as bot admins or practitioners. In this report, we focus on the technical designs of various system components. A detailed case study using Einstein BotBuilder is also presented to show how to apply BotSIM pipeline for bot evaluation and remediation. The detailed system descriptions can be found in our system demo paper. The toolkit is available at: https://github.com/salesforce/BotSIM .

Any organization needs to improve their products, services, and processes. In this context, engaging with customers and understanding their journey is essential. Organizations have leveraged various techniques and technologies to support customer engagement, from call centres to chatbots and virtual agents. Recently, these systems have used Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to analyze large volumes of customer feedback and engagement data. The goal is to understand customers in context and provide meaningful answers across various channels. Despite multiple advances in Conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Recommender Systems (RS), it is still challenging to understand the intent behind customer questions during the customer journey. To address this challenge, in this paper, we study and analyze the recent work in Conversational Recommender Systems (CRS) in general and, more specifically, in chatbot-based CRS. We introduce a pipeline to contextualize the input utterances in conversations. We then take the next step towards leveraging reverse feature engineering to link the contextualized input and learning model to support intent recognition. Since performance evaluation is achieved based on different ML models, we use transformer base models to evaluate the proposed approach using a labelled dialogue dataset (MSDialogue) of question-answering interactions between information seekers and answer providers.

我们提出了一个开放域的社交聊天机器人Chirpy Cardinal。为了既有信息又有信息，我们的机器人以一种真实的，情感上的方式与用户聊天。通过将受控的神经产生与脚手架，手写的对话整合在一起，我们让用户和机器人都轮流推动对话，从而产生引人入胜且流利的体验。Chirpy Cardinal部署在Alexa奖Socialbot Grand Challenge的第四次迭代中，每天处理数千次对话，在9个机器人中排名第二，平均用户评级为3.58/5。

雅典娜2.0是一家亚历克萨奖的社会奖，这是最后两个Alexa奖奖挑战的决赛。雅典娜成功的一个原因是其新的对话管理战略，它允许它动态构建组件模块的对话和响应，导致每个互动的新型对话。在这里，我们在20/21竞争期间描述了Athena的Alexa奖的系统设计和性能。雅典娜的活跃演示以及视频录音将挑起对话AI的艺术状态的讨论。

本文介绍了为法律领域设计域特定的对话代理面临的挑战的关键原则和解决方案。它包括范围，平台，架构和输入数据的准备问题。它提供回答用户查询和记录用户信息，包括联系人详细信息和与案例相关信息的功能。它利用亚马逊Web服务（AWS）Lex后建立的深度学习技术与AWS Lambda相结合。由于缺乏公开的数据，我们确定了两种方法，包括众包实验和存档的查询，以制定许多语言资源。这包括训练数据集，对话代理的一组预定响应，一组回归测试用例和进一步的对话测试集。我们提出了一种分层BOT结构，便于多级别委派并在回归测试集上报告模型准确性。此外，我们突出显示添加到BOT的功能，以改善对话流程和整体用户体验。

我们展示了一个基于逻辑推理的新型对话管理方法的聊天栏。除了帧对话一系列响应生成任务，我们将对话作为协作推断过程，其中扬声器共享信息以实时地合成新知识。我们的Chatbot管道在三个广泛的阶段完成了这种建模。第一阶段将用户话语转换为符号谓词表示。然后，第二阶段与更大的知识库结合使用这种结构化表示来合成使用有效的图形匹配来扫描新谓词。在第三阶段和最后阶段，我们的机器人选择一个小的谓词子集并将它们转化为英语响应。这种方法为了解用户输入的潜在语义，灵活的主动措施以及与对话背景相干的响应。

Training dialogue systems often entails dealing with noisy training examples and unexpected user inputs. Despite their prevalence, there currently lacks an accurate survey of dialogue noise, nor is there a clear sense of the impact of each noise type on task performance. This paper addresses this gap by first constructing a taxonomy of noise encountered by dialogue systems. In addition, we run a series of experiments to show how different models behave when subjected to varying levels of noise and types of noise. Our results reveal that models are quite robust to label errors commonly tackled by existing denoising algorithms, but that performance suffers from dialogue-specific noise. Driven by these observations, we design a data cleaning algorithm specialized for conversational settings and apply it as a proof-of-concept for targeted dialogue denoising.

了解用户的意图并从句子中识别出语义实体，即自然语言理解（NLU），是许多自然语言处理任务的上游任务。主要挑战之一是收集足够数量的注释数据来培训模型。现有有关文本增强的研究并没有充分考虑实体，因此对于NLU任务的表现不佳。为了解决这个问题，我们提出了一种新型的NLP数据增强技术，实体意识数据增强（EADA），该技术应用了树结构，实体意识到语法树（EAST），以表示句子与对实体的注意相结合。我们的EADA技术会自动从少量注释的数据中构造东方，然后生成大量的培训实例，以进行意图检测和插槽填充。四个数据集的实验结果表明，该技术在准确性和泛化能力方面显着优于现有数据增强方法。

最近，通过“向导”模拟游戏收集了一类以任务为导向的对话（TOD）数据集。但是，《巫师》数据实际上是模拟的数据，因此与现实生活中的对话根本不同，这些对话更加嘈杂和随意。最近，Seretod挑战赛是组织的，并发布了Mobilecs数据集，该数据集由来自中国移动的真实用户和客户服务人员之间的真实世界对话框组成。基于Mobilecs数据集，Seretod挑战具有两个任务，不仅评估了对话系统本身的构建，而且还检查了对话框成绩单中的信息提取，这对于建立TOD的知识库至关重要。本文主要介绍了Mobilecs数据集对这两项任务的基线研究。我们介绍了如何构建两个基线，遇到的问题以及结果。我们预计基线可以促进令人兴奋的未来研究，以建立针对现实生活任务的人类机器人对话系统。

以任务为导向的对话系统（TODS）继续升高，因为各种行业发现有效地利用其能力，节省时间和金钱。然而，即使是最先进的TOD尚未达到其全部潜力。TOD通常具有主要设计专注于完成手头的任务，因此任务分辨率的度量应优先考虑。可能会忽略可能指向对话的其他可能指向成功或其他方面的会话质量属性。这可能导致人类和对话系统之间的相互作用，让用户不满意或沮丧。本文探讨了对话系统的评价框架的文献，以及对话系统中的会话质量属性的作用，看起来，如何以及在与对话系统的性能相关的情况下，如何相关。

在最近的工作中已显示出一种模式指导的对话管理方法，可以有效地创建能够充当友好同行或任务助理的强大定制虚拟代理。但是，这些方法在开放式，混合初始性领域中的成功应用仍然难以捉摸 - 尤其是在诸如虚拟标准化患者之类的医疗领域，在这种复杂的互动很常见的情况下 - 比以前的系统需要更广泛，更灵活的对话管理能力提供。在本文中，我们描述了用于开发索菲（Sophie）的通用架构指导的对话管理框架，Sophie是一种虚拟标准化的癌症患者，可让医生方便地练习与患者的互动。我们对医学生和索菲之间的对话进行了众包评估。我们的经纪人被认为是自然，情感上适当的反应，并且与她作为癌症患者的角色一致。此外，它大大优于对人类标准化患者语料库进行微调的端到端神经模型，这证明了模式引导方法的优势。

We present BotSIM, a data-efficient end-to-end Bot SIMulation toolkit for commercial text-based task-oriented dialog (TOD) systems. BotSIM consists of three major components: 1) a Generator that can infer semantic-level dialog acts and entities from bot definitions and generate user queries via model-based paraphrasing; 2) an agenda-based dialog user Simulator (ABUS) to simulate conversations with the dialog agents; 3) a Remediator to analyze the simulated conversations, visualize the bot health reports and provide actionable remediation suggestions for bot troubleshooting and improvement. We demonstrate BotSIM's effectiveness in end-to-end evaluation, remediation and multi-intent dialog generation via case studies on two commercial bot platforms. BotSIM's "generation-simulation-remediation" paradigm accelerates the end-to-end bot evaluation and iteration process by: 1) reducing manual test cases creation efforts; 2) enabling a holistic gauge of the bot in terms of NLU and end-to-end performance via extensive dialog simulation; 3) improving the bot troubleshooting process with actionable suggestions. A demo of our system can be found at https://tinyurl.com/mryu74cd and a demo video at https://youtu.be/qLi5iSoly30. We have open-sourced the toolkit at https://github.com/salesforce/botsim

我们提出了Tacobot，这是为首届Alexa Prive Taskbot Challenge构建的面向任务的对话系统，该系统可帮助用户完成多步骤烹饪和家庭装修任务。Tacobot的设计采用以用户为中心的原则，并渴望提供协作且易于访问的对话体验。为此，它具有准确的语言理解，灵活的对话管理和引人入胜的响应生成。此外，Tacobot还以强大的搜索引擎和自动化的端到端测试套件为支持。在引导Tacobot的开发中，我们探索了一系列数据增强策略，以训练先进的神经语言处理模型，并通过收集的真实对话不断改善对话经验。在半决赛结束时，Tacobot的平均评分为3.55/5.0。

与具有粗粒度信息的Crosswoz（中文）和多发性（英文）数据集相比，没有数据集，可以正确处理细粒度和分层级别信息。在本文中，我们在香港发布了一份粤语知识驱动的对话数据集（KDDRES），将多转谈话中的信息放在一个特定的餐厅。我们的语料库包含0.8k次谈话，它来自10家餐厅，提供不同地区的各种风格。除此之外，我们还设计了细粒度的插槽和意图，以更好地捕获语义信息。基准实验和数据统计分析显示了我们数据集的多样性和丰富的注释。我们认为，KDDRE的出版可以是当前对话数据集的必要补充，以及社会中小企业（中小企业）更适合和更有价值，如为每家餐馆建立定制的对话系统。语料库和基准模型是公开可用的。

本文介绍了CAIR的设计和实施：为社会机器人和其他对话代理而设计的基于知识的自主互动的云系统。该系统对于低成本机器人和设备特别方便。为开发人员提供了一种可持续的解决方案，可以通过网络连接来管理口头和非语言互动，约有3,000个对话主题可以进行“闲聊”，并提供了一个预先煮熟的计划库，只需要将其接地到机器人的库中物理能力。该系统的结构为一组REST API端点，因此可以通过添加新的API来轻松扩展它，以提高连接到云的客户端的功能。该系统的另一个关键功能是它旨在使客户的开发变得直接：这样，可以轻松地赋予多个设备与用户自主交互的能力，了解何时执行特定的操作并利用云服务提供的所有信息。文章概述并讨论了为评估系统响应时间的性能而执行的实验结果，为研究和市场解决方案铺平了道路。提供了与ROS的客户的存储库的链接，并提供了诸如Pepper和Nao之类的流行机器人的链接。

Even though machine learning has become the major scene in dialogue research community, the real breakthrough has been blocked by the scale of data available. To address this fundamental obstacle, we introduce the Multi-Domain Wizard-of-Oz dataset (MultiWOZ), a fully-labeled collection of human-human written conversations spanning over multiple domains and topics. At a size of 10k dialogues, it is at least one order of magnitude larger than all previous annotated task-oriented corpora. The contribution of this work apart from the open-sourced dataset labelled with dialogue belief states and dialogue actions is two-fold: firstly, a detailed description of the data collection procedure along with a summary of data structure and analysis is provided. The proposed data-collection pipeline is entirely based on crowd-sourcing without the need of hiring professional annotators; secondly, a set of benchmark results of belief tracking, dialogue act and response generation is reported, which shows the usability of the data and sets a baseline for future studies.

我们提出了一个基于深度学习的外语学习平台，命名为FreeLalky，因为使用人形机器人NAO和各种深入学习模型，他们会受到对外语言的焦虑的人。嵌入在NAO的基于角色的对话系统为用户提供了一个有趣和一致的多转对话。此外，语法纠错系统促进了用户语法技能的改进。因此，我们的系统支持基于角色对话的个性化学习，并使用语法错误反馈促进语法学习用户。此外，我们通过人类评估通过替换与NAO机器人的谈话来替换真正的人类，验证了FreeTalky是否提供了减轻卵杆菌的实际帮助。

Virtual assistants such as Google Assistant, Alexa and Siri provide a conversational interface to a large number of services and APIs spanning multiple domains. Such systems need to support an ever-increasing number of services with possibly overlapping functionality. Furthermore, some of these services have little to no training data available. Existing public datasets for task-oriented dialogue do not sufficiently capture these challenges since they cover few domains and assume a single static ontology per domain. In this work, we introduce the the Schema-Guided Dialogue (SGD) dataset, containing over 16k multi-domain conversations spanning 16 domains. Our dataset exceeds the existing task-oriented dialogue corpora in scale, while also highlighting the challenges associated with building large-scale virtual assistants. It provides a challenging testbed for a number of tasks including language understanding, slot filling, dialogue state tracking and response generation. Along the same lines, we present a schema-guided paradigm for task-oriented dialogue, in which predictions are made over a dynamic set of intents and slots, provided as input, using their natural language descriptions. This allows a single dialogue system to easily support a large number of services and facilitates simple integration of new services without requiring additional training data. Building upon the proposed paradigm, we release a model for dialogue state tracking capable of zero-shot generalization to new APIs, while remaining competitive in the regular setting.

Business processes that involve AI-powered automation have been gaining importance and market share in recent years. These business processes combine the characteristics of classical business process management, goal-driven chatbots, conversational recommendation systems, and robotic process automation. In the new context, prescriptive process monitoring demands innovative approaches. Unfortunately, data logs from these new processes are still not available in the public domain. We describe the main challenges in this new domain and introduce a synthesized dataset that is based on an actual use case of intelligent process automation with chatbot orchestration. Using this dataset, we demonstrate crowd-wisdom and goal-driven approaches to prescriptive process monitoring.