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Athena 3.0: Personalized multimodal chatbot with neuro-symbolic dialogue generators

By University of California, Santa Cruz
2023
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The burgeoning prominence of conversational agents is evident, given the significant number of people interacting with them on a daily basis. The utility of these agents isn’t confined to functioning as personal assistants; they fulfill a variety of objectives. Some of them are task-centric, for instance, facilitating customer support for financial institutions or assisting in reservation processes. Conversely, certain agents are programmed to embody empathy, thereby fostering an emotional rapport with the users. The aim of the Alexa Prize Socialbot Grand Challenge (SGC) is the creation of a socialbot that facilitates engaging, coherent dialogues on a wide array of trending topics appealing to users. In addition to operating as a spoken chat agent, Athena 3.0 offers multimodal interactivity through screen usage. In this technical report, we describe Athena 3.0. Athena 3.0 advances upon its predecessor, Athena 2.0, by supporting multimodal conversation and substantiating a neuro-symbolic experience by fusing LLM-based generators with existing conversation strategies.

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