# A Flexible Schema-Guided Dialogue Management Framework: From Friendly Peer to Virtual Standardized Cancer Patient

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.07276 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07276/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Jul 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [DialoGPT: Large-Scale Generative Pre-training for Conversational Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00536/) (2019)
- [Recipes for building an open-domain chatbot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13637/) (2020)
- [Towards a Human-like Open-Domain Chatbot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.09977/) (2020)
- [Towards Scalable Multi-domain Conversational Agents: The Schema-Guided Dialogue Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05855/) (2019)
- [Constrained Language Models Yield Few-Shot Semantic Parsers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08768/) (2021)
- [STAR: A Schema-Guided Dialog Dataset for Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11853/) (2020)
- [Schema-Guided Paradigm for Zero-Shot Dialog](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07056/) (2021)
- [ERICA: An Empathetic Android Companion for Covid-19 Quarantine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02325/) (2021)
- [Novel Computational Linguistic Measures, Dialogue System and the Development of SOPHIE: Standardized Online Patient for Healthcare Interaction Education](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.11247/) (2020)
- [Dialogue Design and Management for Multi-Session Casual Conversation with Older Adults](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.06620/) (2019)
- [A Transition-based Parser for Unscoped Episodic Logical Forms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.08759/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Towards a Neural Era in Dialogue Management for Collaboration: A Literature Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09021/) (2023)
- [Design and Evaluation of a Culturally Adapted Multimodal Virtual Agent for PTSD Screening](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.17871/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

A schema-guided approach to dialogue management has been shown in recent work to be effective in creating robust customizable virtual agents capable of acting as friendly peers or task assistants. However, successful applications of these methods in open-ended, mixed-initiative domains remain elusive -- particularly within medical domains such as virtual standardized patients, where such complex interactions are commonplace -- and require more extensive and flexible dialogue management capabilities than previous systems provide. In this paper, we describe a general-purpose schema-guided dialogue management framework used to develop SOPHIE, a virtual standardized cancer patient that allows a doctor to conveniently practice for interactions with patients. We conduct a crowdsourced evaluation of conversations between medical students and SOPHIE. Our agent is judged to produce responses that are natural, emotionally appropriate, and consistent with her role as a cancer patient. Furthermore, it significantly outperforms an end-to-end neural model fine-tuned on a human standardized patient corpus, attesting to the advantages of a schema-guided approach.