Mixed-initiative conversational system using question-answer pairs mined from the web

Authors:
Wilson Wong;Lawrence Cavedon;John Thangarajah;Lin Padgham
Affiliations:
RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia;RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia;RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia;RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia
Venue:
Proceedings of the 21st ACM international conference on Information and knowledge management
Year:
2012

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Abstract

One of the biggest bottlenecks for conversational systems is large-scale provision of suitable content. Our approach readily provides this without the need for custom-crafting. In this demonstration, we present the use of question-answer (QA) pairs mined from online question-and-answer websites to construct system utterances for a conversational agent. Our system uses QA pairs to formulate utterances that drive a conversation in addition to the answering of user questions as has been done in previous work. We use a collection of strategies that specify how and when the different parts of our question-answer pairs can be used and augmented with a small number of generic hand-crafted text snippets to generate natural and coherent system utterances.