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.

中文翻译：

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雅典娜：以话语约束动态构建对话

本报告介绍了Athena，这是一个对话系统，可用于就热门话题和时事进行口头对话。我们开发了一种灵活的与主题无关的对话管理方法，该方法根据实体和主题连贯性的一般原理动态配置对话。雅典娜的对话管理器使用基于合同的方法，将话语约束分配给响应生成器集群。这使Athena可以从动态源获取响应，例如知识图遍历和基于功能的实时响应检索方法。在描述了对话系统架构之后，我们对雅典娜在2019年Alexa竞赛中参加的对话进行了分析。