SOLOIST: Pairing transfer learning and machine teaching to advance task bots at scale
The increasing use of personal assistants and messaging applications has spurred interest in building task-oriented dialog systems (or task bots) that can communicate with users through natural language to accomplish a wide range of tasks, such as restaurant booking, weather query, flight booking, or IT helpdesk support. The wide variety of tasks and domains has created the need for a flexible task-oriented dialog development platform that can support many different use cases while remaining straightforward for developers to use and maintain.
Most popular commercial tools for dialog development employ modular systems. They are designed mainly to help develop systems manually, that is, by writing code, crafting rules and making templates. Unfortunately, even with these tools, building dialog systems remains a label-intensive,