# Sounding Board: A User-Centric and Content-Driven Social Chatbot

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.10202 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.10202/

## Key facts

- Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 26 Apr 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [TIAGE: A Benchmark for Topic-Shift Aware Dialog Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04562/) (2021)
- [Jurassic is (almost) All You Need: Few-Shot Meaning-to-Text Generation for Open-Domain Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08094/) (2021)
- [Modeling Performance in Open-Domain Dialogue with PARADISE](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.11164/) (2021)
- [Athena 2.0: Contextualized Dialogue Management for an Alexa Prize SocialBot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.02519/) (2021)
- [Large Language Model Agents for Improving Engagement with Behavior Change Interventions: Application to Digital Mindfulness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13067/) (2024)
- [An animated picture says at least a thousand words: Selecting Gif-based Replies in Multimodal Dialog](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.12212/) (2021)
- [WeaSuL: Weakly Supervised Dialogue Policy Learning: Reward Estimation for Multi-turn Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.01487/) (2021)
- [Guiding Topic Flows in the Generative Chatbot by Enhancing the ConceptNet with the Conversation Corpora](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05406/) (2021)
- [Let's Get Personal: Personal Questions Improve SocialBot Performance in the Alexa Prize](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04953/) (2023)
- [Athena 2.0: Discourse and User Modeling in Open Domain Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.01887/) (2023)
- [Policy-driven Knowledge Selection and Response Generation for Document-grounded Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15970/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present Sounding Board, a social chatbot that won the 2017 Amazon Alexa Prize. The system architecture consists of several components including spoken language processing, dialogue management, language generation, and content management, with emphasis on user-centric and content-driven design. We also share insights gained from large-scale online logs based on 160,000 conversations with real-world users.