# Athena 2.0: Contextualized Dialogue Management for an Alexa Prize SocialBot

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.02519 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.02519/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Nov 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.02320/) (2020)
- [Build it Break it Fix it for Dialogue Safety: Robustness from Adversarial Human Attack](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06083/) (2019)
- [Key-Value Retrieval Networks for Task-Oriented Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.05414/) (2017)
- [ViGGO: A Video Game Corpus for Data-To-Text Generation in Open-Domain Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.12129/) (2019)
- [Advancing the State of the Art in Open Domain Dialog Systems through the Alexa Prize](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.10757/) (2018)
- [Neural Generation Meets Real People: Towards Emotionally Engaging Mixed-Initiative Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.12348/) (2020)
- [Are Neural Open-Domain Dialog Systems Robust to Speech Recognition Errors in the Dialog History? An Empirical Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.07683/) (2020)
- [Emora: An Inquisitive Social Chatbot Who Cares For You](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.04617/) (2020)
- [Maximizing Stylistic Control and Semantic Accuracy in NLG: Personality Variation and Discourse Contrast](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.09527/) (2019)
- [Sounding Board: A User-Centric and Content-Driven Social Chatbot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.10202/) (2018)
- [Attention Is Indeed All You Need: Semantically Attention-Guided Decoding for Data-to-Text NLG](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07043/) (2021)
- [Curate and Generate: A Corpus and Method for Joint Control of Semantics and Style in Neural NLG](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.01334/) (2019)
- [Gunrock 2.0: A User Adaptive Social Conversational System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.08906/) (2020)
- [Neural Response Ranking for Social Conversation: A Data-Efficient Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00967/) (2018)
- [Athena: Constructing Dialogues Dynamically with Discourse Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10683/) (2020)
- [Learning from Mistakes: Combining Ontologies via Self-Training for Dialogue Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.00150/) (2020)
- [Entertaining and Opinionated but Too Controlling: A Large-Scale User Study of an Open Domain Alexa Prize System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.04832/) (2019)
- [Natural Language Generation at Scale: A Case Study for Open Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.08097/) (2019)
- [SlugBot: Developing a Computational Model andFramework of a Novel Dialogue Genre](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10658/) (2019)
- [Alquist 2.0: Alexa Prize Socialbot Based on Sub-Dialogue Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.03259/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [What is wrong with you?: Leveraging User Sentiment for Automatic Dialog Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13927/) (2022)
- [DialGuide: Aligning Dialogue Model Behavior with Developer Guidelines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10557/) (2022)
- [A Transformer-based Response Evaluator for Open-Domain Spoken Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04424/) (2023)
- [Let's Get Personal: Personal Questions Improve SocialBot Performance in the Alexa Prize](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04953/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Athena 2.0 is an Alexa Prize SocialBot that has been a finalist in the last two Alexa Prize Grand Challenges. One reason for Athena's success is its novel dialogue management strategy, which allows it to dynamically construct dialogues and responses from component modules, leading to novel conversations with every interaction. Here we describe Athena's system design and performance in the Alexa Prize during the 20/21 competition. A live demo of Athena as well as video recordings will provoke discussion on the state of the art in conversational AI.