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Emory IrisBot: An open-domain conversational bot for personalized information access

By Emory University
2018
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We describe IrisBot, a conversational agent that aims to help a customer be informed about the world around them, while being entertained and engaged. Our bot attempts to incorporate real-time search, informed advice, and latest news recommendation into a coherent conversation. IrisBot can already track information on the latest topics and opinions from News, Sports, and Entertainment and some specialized domains. The key technical innovations of IrisBot are novel algorithms for contextualized classification of the topic and intent of the user’s utterances, modular ranking of potential responses, and personalized topic suggestions. Our preliminary experimental results based on overall customer experience ratings and A/B testing analysis, focus on understanding the contribution of both algorithmic and surface presentation features. We also suggest promising directions for continued research, primarily focusing on increasing the coverage of topics for in-depth domain understanding, further personalizing the conversation experience, and making the conversation interesting and novel for returning customers.

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