Strategies for Mixed-Initiative Conversation Management using Question-Answer Pairs
Wilson Wong, Lawrence Cavedon, John Thangarajah, Lin Padgham · RMIT Research Repository (RMIT University Library) · 2012
One of the biggest bottlenecks for conversational systems is large-scale provision of suitable content. In this paper, we present the use of content mined from online question-and-answer forums to automatically construct system utterances. Although this content is mined in the form of question-answer pairs, our system is able to use it to formulate utterances that drive a conversation, not just for answering user questions as has been done in previous work. We use a collection of strategies that specify how and when the 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. Our experiments involving 11 human participants demonstrated that this approach can indeed produce relatively natural and coherent interaction.