LTI Colloquium: Emora: An Inquisitive Social Chatbot Who Cares for You -- Jinho Choi

Speaker: Jinho Choi @ Emory University
Website: http://www.mathcs.emory.edu/~choi/
Title: Emora: An Inquisitive Social Chatbot Who Cares for You
Abstract: Dr. Choi presents technology behind the Conversational AI-based chatbot called Emora, that was awarded the first place in this year’s Alexa Prize Socialbot Grand Challenge. Emora is premised on the notions of active curiosity and caring, and brings opinion and feeling to Conversational AI, which had mostly been information-based and task-oriented. After interacting with Emora, we want you to have the feel of talking to a close friend rather than being served by an information kiosk. This talk begins by demonstrating limitations on the current state-of-the-art chatbots and compares user experiences from information-based, opinion-based, and experience-based dialogue managements observed during the Alexa Prize. Emora is based on the Emory State Transition Dialogue Manager that facilitates the design of engaging dialogue flows with complex probabilistic finite-state machines. Key features such as topic handling, user profiling, and personality development are also discussed.

#NLProc Natural Language Processing #MachineLearning CMU LTI