Natural language generation lies at the core of generative dialogue systems and conversational
agents. We describe an ensemble neural language generator, and present several …

Chatbots are a rapidly expanding application of dialogue systems with companies switching
to bot services for customer support, and new applications for users interested in casual …

The uptake of deep learning in natural language generation (NLG) led to the release of both
small and relatively large parallel corpora for training neural models. The existing data-to-…

In dialogue systems, the tasks of named entity recognition (NER) and named entity linking (NEL)
are vital preprocessing steps for understanding user intent, especially in open domain …

Discourse relation identification has been an active area of research for many years, and the
challenge of identifying implicit relations remains largely an unsolved task, especially in the …

Storytelling serves many different social functions, eg stories are used to persuade, share
troubles, establish shared values, learn social behaviors, and entertain. Moreover, stories are …

This report describes Athena, a dialogue system for spoken conversation on popular topics
and current events. We develop a flexible topic-agnostic approach to dialogue management …

In order to build dialogue systems to tackle the ambitious task of holding social conversations,
we argue that we need a data-driven approach that includes insight into human …

We present a new corpus, PersonaBank, consisting of 108 personal stories from weblogs that
have been annotated with their Story Intention Graphs, a deep representation of the fabula …

Athena 2.0 is an Alexa Prize SocialBot that has been a finalist in the last two Alexa Prize Grand
Challenges. One reason for Athena's success is its novel dialogue management strategy, …