Alquist 4.0: Towards social intelligence using generative models and dialogue personalization

The open domain-dialogue system Alquist has a goal to conduct a coherent and engaging conversation that can be considered as one of the benchmarks of social intelligence. The fourth version of the system, developed within the Alexa Prize Socialbot Grand Challenge 4, brings two main innovations. The first addresses coherence, and the second addresses the engagingness of the conversation.

For innovations regarding coherence, we propose a novel hybrid approach com- bining hand-designed responses and a generative model. The proposed approach utilizes hand-designed dialogues, out-of-domain detection, and a neural response generator. Hand-designed dialogues walk the user through high-quality conversa- tional flows. The out-of-domain detection recognizes that the user diverges from the predefined flow and prevents the system from producing a scripted response that might not make sense for unexpected user input. Finally, the neural response generator generates a response based on the context of the dialogue that correctly reacts to the unexpected user input and returns the dialogue to the boundaries of hand-designed dialogues.

The innovations for engagement that we propose are mostly inspired by the famous exploration-exploitation dilemma. To conduct an engaging conversation with the dialogue partners, one has to learn their preferences and interests—exploration. Moreover, to engage the partner, we have to utilize the knowledge we have already learned—exploitation.

In this work, we present the principles and inner workings of individual components of the open-domain dialogue system Alquist developed within the Alexa Prize Socialbot Grand Challenge 4 and the experiments we have conducted to evaluate them.