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Evorus: A Crowd-powered Conversational Assistant Built to Automate Itself Over Time

Published: 21 April 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Crowd-powered conversational assistants have been shown to be more robust than automated systems, but do so at the cost of higher response latency and monetary costs. A promising direction is to combine the two approaches for high quality, low latency, and low cost solutions. In this paper, we introduce Evorus, a crowd-powered conversational assistant built to automate itself over time by (i) allowing new chatbots to be easily integrated to automate more scenarios, (ii) reusing prior crowd answers, and (iii) learning to automatically approve response candidates. Our 5-month-long deployment with 80 participants and 281 conversations shows that Evorus can automate itself without compromising conversation quality. Crowd-AI architectures have long been proposed as a way to reduce cost and latency for crowd-powered systems; Evorus demonstrates how automation can be introduced successfully in a deployed system. Its architecture allows future researchers to make further innovation on the underlying automated components in the context of a deployed open domain dialog system.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI '18: Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    April 2018
    8489 pages
    ISBN:9781450356206
    DOI:10.1145/3173574
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    Published: 21 April 2018

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    1. chatbot
    2. conversational assistant
    3. crowd-powered system
    4. crowdsourcing
    5. real-time crowdsourcing

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    CHI '18 Paper Acceptance Rate 666 of 2,590 submissions, 26%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 6,199 of 26,314 submissions, 24%

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    • (2024)Knowledge-Enhanced Conversational AgentsJournal of Computer Science and Technology10.1007/s11390-024-2883-439:3(585-609)Online publication date: 22-Jul-2024
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