Alquist 4.0: Towards Social Intelligence Using Generative Models and Dialogue

This paper presents the winner system Alquist 4.0 in the Alexa Prize Socialbot Grand Challenge 4. It brings two major innovations. The first one is that they propose a hybrid approach combing hand-designed responses and a NLG model. They classifier each utterance as in-domain which follows hand-designed dialog flow while out-of-domain triggers NLG. The second innovation is that they use regular expressions (skimmer) to extract user profile and incorporate these with KBs in the later dialog.

Comments

  • The overall design of dialog bot is quite competitive in that it has almost every essence that a modern bot would have: user profile, KB, NLG, intent classifier. And it’s amazing to see they put them together and get them to work.
  • Their carefully selected corpus (reddit trivia, question vs statement) also reflects their expertise in QA.
Rating
  • 5: Transformative: This paper is likely to change our field. It should be considered for a best paper award.
  • 4.5: Exciting: It changed my thinking on this topic. I would fight for it to be accepted.
  • 4: Strong: I learned a lot from it. I would like to see it accepted.
  • 3.5: Leaning positive: It can be accepted more or less in its current form. However, the work it describes is not particularly exciting and/or inspiring, so it will not be a big loss if people don’t see it in this conference.
  • 3: Ambivalent: It has merits (e.g., it reports state-of-the-art results, the idea is nice), but there are key weaknesses (e.g., I didn’t learn much from it, evaluation is not convincing, it describes incremental work). I believe it can significantly benefit from another round of revision, but I won’t object to accepting it if my co-reviewers are willing to champion it.
  • 2.5: Leaning negative: I am leaning towards rejection, but I can be persuaded if my co-reviewers think otherwise.
  • 2: Mediocre: I would rather not see it in the conference.
  • 1.5: Weak: I am pretty confident that it should be rejected.
  • 1: Poor: I would fight to have it rejected.

0 voters