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EvoquerBot: A multimedia chatbot leveraging synthetic data for cross-domain assistance

By Penn State University
2023
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EvoquerBot, developed for the TaskBot challenge, is a multimedia chatbot designed to assist users in completing cooking and DIY tasks within a single session. The bot leverages a coordinated orchestration of submodules for intent classification, task recommendation, task description, and step navigation. This paper addresses the challenges of short development and model training time, data quality in both NLP and multimedia sectors, multimedia response handling, and tailoring the conversation flow to domain-specific user experiences. To overcome these, we propose agile classifier development, data augmentation, multimedia response design, and domain-specific dialogue state machines. The conversation flow is governed by an efficient intent classifier and a recursion-based state machine, further enhanced with features such as Cooking Image Augmentation and DIY Substep Decomposition. The effectiveness of our system is validated by the superior relevance of task recommendations, demonstrating its ability to enhance user experience.

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