# Athena 2.0: Discourse and User Modeling in Open Domain Dialogue

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.01887 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.01887/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Aug 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 30)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [The Curious Case of Neural Text Degeneration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09751/) (2019)
- [SpanBERT: Improving Pre-training by Representing and Predicting Spans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10529/) (2019)
- [How NOT To Evaluate Your Dialogue System: An Empirical Study of Unsupervised Evaluation Metrics for Dialogue Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08023/) (2016)
- [TransferTransfo: A Transfer Learning Approach for Neural Network Based Conversational Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08149/) (2019)
- [USR: An Unsupervised and Reference Free Evaluation Metric for Dialog Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00456/) (2020)
- [Build it Break it Fix it for Dialogue Safety: Robustness from Adversarial Human Attack](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06083/) (2019)
- [The Design and Implementation of XiaoIce, an Empathetic Social Chatbot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08989/) (2018)
- [Higher-order Coreference Resolution with Coarse-to-fine Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.05392/) (2018)
- [Deep Reinforcement Learning for Mention-Ranking Coreference Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.08667/) (2016)
- [Overview of the Ninth Dialog System Technology Challenge: DSTC9](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.06486/) (2020)
- [Towards Coherent and Engaging Spoken Dialog Response Generation Using Automatic Conversation Evaluators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.13015/) (2019)
- [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)
- [A Deep Ensemble Model with Slot Alignment for Sequence-to-Sequence Natural Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.06553/) (2018)
- [Policy-Driven Neural Response Generation for Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12529/) (2020)
- [Emora: An Inquisitive Social Chatbot Who Cares For You](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.04617/) (2020)
- [Dialogue Act Sequence Labeling using Hierarchical encoder with CRF](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.04250/) (2017)
- [ISO-Standard Domain-Independent Dialogue Act Tagging for Conversational Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.04327/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Curate and Generate: A Corpus and Method for Joint Control of Semantics and Style in Neural NLG](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.01334/) (2019)
- [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)
- [SlugBot: Developing a Computational Model andFramework of a Novel Dialogue Genre](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10658/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Conversational agents are consistently growing in popularity and many people interact with them every day. While many conversational agents act as personal assistants, they can have many different goals. Some are task-oriented, such as providing customer support for a bank or making a reservation. Others are designed to be empathetic and to form emotional connections with the user. The Alexa Prize Challenge aims to create a socialbot, which allows the user to engage in coherent conversations, on a range of popular topics that will interest the user. Here we describe Athena 2.0, UCSC's conversational agent for Amazon's Socialbot Grand Challenge 4. Athena 2.0 utilizes a novel knowledge-grounded discourse model that tracks the entity links that Athena introduces into the dialogue, and uses them to constrain named-entity recognition and linking, and coreference resolution. Athena 2.0 also relies on a user model to personalize topic selection and other aspects of the conversation to individual users.