62 - Sounding Board: A User-Centric and Content-Driven Social Chatbot, with Hao Fang

NAACL 2018 demo paper, by Hao Fang, Hao Cheng, Maarten Sap,
Elizabeth Clark, Ari Holtzman, Yejin Choi, Noah A. Smith, and Mari
Ostendorf Sounding Board was the system that won the 2017 Amazon
Alexa Prize, a competition to build a social chatbot that interacts
with users as an Alexa skill. Hao comes on the podcast to tell us
about the project. We talk for a little bit about how Sounding
Board works, but spend most of the conversation talking about what
these chatbots can do - the competition setup, some example
interactions, the limits of current systems, and how chatbots might
be more useful in the future. Even the best current systems seem
pretty limited, but the potential future uses are compelling enough
to warrant continued research.
https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Sounding-Board%3A-A-User-Centric-and-Content-Driven-Fang-Cheng/b540fd427a02b19c6ea55dd7d9758ebf15ec3965