# Gunrock: A Social Bot for Complex and Engaging Long Conversations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.03042 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03042/

## Key facts

- Cited by 14 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 7 Oct 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [ESPnet-SLU: Advancing Spoken Language Understanding through ESPnet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14706/) (2021)
- [Neural Approaches to Conversational Information Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05176/) (2022)
- [Few-shot Intent Classification and Slot Filling with Retrieved Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05763/) (2021)
- [A Study on the Integration of Pre-trained SSL, ASR, LM and SLU Models for Spoken Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05869/) (2022)
- [Token-level Sequence Labeling for Spoken Language Understanding using Compositional End-to-End Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.15734/) (2022)
- [On the Evaluation of Speech Foundation Models for Spoken Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10083/) (2024)
- [Two-Pass Low Latency End-to-End Spoken Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.06670/) (2022)
- [Automatically Exposing Problems with Neural Dialog Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.06950/) (2021)
- [Neural Generation Meets Real People: Building a Social, Informative Open-Domain Dialogue Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12021/) (2022)
- [Apollonion: Profile-centric Dialog Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.08692/) (2024)
- [Low-Resource Adaptation of Open-Domain Generative Chatbots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06329/) (2021)
- [Integrating Pretrained ASR and LM to Perform Sequence Generation for Spoken Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.11005/) (2023)
- [Enhancing User Engagement in Socially-Driven Dialogue through Interactive LLM Alignments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21497/) (2025)
- [Policy-driven Knowledge Selection and Response Generation for Document-grounded Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15970/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Gunrock is the winner of the 2018 Amazon Alexa Prize, as evaluated by coherence and engagement from both real users and Amazon-selected expert conversationalists. We focus on understanding complex sentences and having in-depth conversations in open domains. In this paper, we introduce some innovative system designs and related validation analysis. Overall, we found that users produce longer sentences to Gunrock, which are directly related to users' engagement (e.g., ratings, number of turns). Additionally, users' backstory queries about Gunrock are positively correlated to user satisfaction. Finally, we found dialog flows that interleave facts and personal opinions and stories lead to better user satisfaction.