Combining Search with Structured Data to Create a More Engaging User Experience in Open Domain Dialogue

Understand

The greatest challenges in building sophisticated open-domain conversational agents arise directly from the potential for ongoing mixed-initiative multi-turn dialogues, which do not follow a particular plan or pursue a particular fixed information need.

• In order to make coherent conversational contributions in this context, a conversational agent must be able to track the types and attributes of the entities under discussion in the conversation and know how they are related.
• In some cases, the agent can rely on structured information sources to help identify the relevant semantic relations and produce a turn, but in other cases, the only content available comes from search, and it may be unclear which semantic relations hold between the search results and the discourse context.
• A further constraint is that the system must produce its contribution to the ongoing conversation in real-time.