Learning and Reusing Dialog for Repeated Interactions with a Situated Social Agent

Content authoring for conversations is a limiting factor in creating verbal interactions with intelligent virtual agents. Building on techniques utilizing semi-situated learning in an incremental crowdworking pipeline, this paper introduces an embodied agent that self-authors its own dialog for social chat. In particular, the autonomous use of crowd-workers is supplemented with a generalization method that borrows and assesses the validity of dialog across conversational states. We argue that the approach offers a community-focused tailoring of dialog responses that is not available in approaches that rely solely on statistical methods across big data. We demonstrate the advantages that this can bring to interactions through data collected from 486 conversations between a situated social agent and 22 users during a 3 week long evaluation period.