Conventional Voice Assistants (VAs) rely on traditional language models to discern user
intent and respond to their queries, leading to interactions that often lack a broader …

Conversational information seeking (CIS) is concerned with a sequence of interactions
between one or more users and an information system. Interactions in CIS are primarily …

Applying existing methods to emotional support conversation--which provides valuable
assistance to people who are in need--has two major limitations:(a) they generally employ a …

Zero-shot transfer learning for multi-domain dialogue state tracking can allow us to handle
new domains without incurring the high cost of data acquisition. This paper proposes new …

Few-shot learning arises in important practical scenarios, such as when a natural language
understanding system needs to learn new semantic labels for an emerging, resource-scarce …

Effective question-asking is a crucial component of a successful conversational chatbot. It
could help the bots manifest empathy and render the interaction more engaging by …

We present Chirpy Cardinal, an open-domain dialogue agent, as a research platform for the
2019 Alexa Prize competition. Building an open-domain socialbot that talks to real people is …

An image is worth a thousand words, conveying information that goes beyond the physical
visual content therein. In this paper, we study the intent behind social media images with an …

Using chatbots to make recommendations is increasingly popular. The design of
recommendation chatbots has mainly been taking an information-centric approach by …

Gunrock 2.0 is built on top of Gunrock with an emphasis on user adaptation. Gunrock 2.0
combines various neural natural language understanding modules, including named entity …