Our demo paper “HyLECA: A Framework for Developing Hybrid Long-term Engaging Controlled Conversational Agents” is accepted to be published in the proceedings of the 5th iteration of the ACM conference on Conversational User Interfaces (CUI). The publication also gained a spot in the conference for a demo presentation, which is going to take place between 19-21 July 2023.
Our demo session details on the conference website: https://programs.sigchi.org/cui/2023/program/content/118874
Read the paper at https://doi.org/10.1145/3571884.3604404
Title
HyLECA: A Framework for Developing Hybrid Long-term Engaging Controlled Conversational Agents
Abstract
We present HyLECA, an open-source framework designed for the development of long-term engaging controlled conversational agents. HyLECA’s dialogue manager employs a hybrid architecture, combining rule-based methods for controlled dialogue flows with retrieval-based and generation-based approaches to enhance the utterance variability and flexibility. The motivation behind HyLECA lies in enhancing user engagement and enjoyment in task-oriented chatbots by leveraging the natural language generation capabilities of open-domain large language models within the confines of predetermined dialogue flows. Moreover, we discuss the technical capabilities, potential applications, relevance, and adaptability of the system. Lastly, we report preliminary findings from integrating state-of-the-art large language models in simulating a conversation centred on smoking cessation.
Reference
Basar, E., Balaji, D., He, L., Hendrickx, I., Krahmer, E., de Bruijn, G., & Bosse, T. (2023). HyLECA: A Framework for Developing Hybrid Long-term Engaging Controlled Conversational Agents. In Proceedings of the 5th Conference on Conversational User Interfaces (CUI’23). ACM.