Claudio Pinhanez, Paulo Cavalin, Victor Henrique Alves Ribeiro, Ana Appel, Heloisa Candello, Julio Nogima, Mauro Pichiliani, Melina Guerra, Maira de Bayser, Gabriel Malfatti, Henrique Ferreira. Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2021.

This paper describes how machine learning training data and symbolic knowledge from curators of conversational systems can be used together to improve the accuracy of those systems and to enable better curatorial tools. This is done in the context of a real-world practice of curators of conversational systems who often embed taxonomically-structured meta-knowledge into their documentation. The paper provides evidence that the practice is quite common among curators, that is used as part of their collaborative practices, and that the embedded knowledge can be mined by algorithms. Further, this meta-knowledge can be integrated, using neuro-symbolic algorithms, to the machine learning-based conversational system, to improve its run-time accuracy and to enable tools to support curatorial tasks. Those results point towards new ways of designing development tools which explore an integrated use of code and documentation by machines.

In a setting where two AI agents embodied as animated humanoid avatars are engaged in a conversation with one human and each other, we see two challenges. One, determination by the AI agents about which one of them is being addressed. Two, determination by the AI agents if they may/could/should speak at the end of a turn. In this work we bring these two challenges together and explore the participation of AI agents in multi-party conversations. Particularly, we show two embodied AI shopkeeper agents who sell similar items aiming to get the business of a user by competing with each other on the price. In this scenario, we solve the first challenge by using headpose (estimated by deep learning techniques) to determine who the user is talking to. For the second challenge we use deontic logic to model rules of a negotiation conversation.