# Athena: Constructing Dialogues Dynamically with Discourse Constraints

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.10683 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10683/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 21 Nov 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [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)
- [A Transformer-based Response Evaluator for Open-Domain Spoken Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04424/) (2023)
- [Viola: A Topic Agnostic Generate-and-Rank Dialogue System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.11063/) (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)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This report describes Athena, a dialogue system for spoken conversation on popular topics and current events. We develop a flexible topic-agnostic approach to dialogue management that dynamically configures dialogue based on general principles of entity and topic coherence. Athena's dialogue manager uses a contract-based method where discourse constraints are dispatched to clusters of response generators. This allows Athena to procure responses from dynamic sources, such as knowledge graph traversals and feature-based on-the-fly response retrieval methods. After describing the dialogue system architecture, we perform an analysis of conversations that Athena participated in during the 2019 Alexa Prize Competition. We conclude with a report on several user studies we carried out to better understand how individual user characteristics affect system ratings.