Seminar: Exploiting Semantic Web Technologies in Open-domain Conversational Agents

Title: Exploiting Semantic Web Technologies in Open-domain Conversational Agents

Speaker: Alessandro Suglia, Heriot-Watt University

Date: 11:15 on 10 December 2018

Location: CM F.17, Heriot-Watt University

Abstract: The Amazon Alexa Prize is an international competition organised to foster the development of sophisticated open-domain conversational agents. During the competition, the systems should be able to support a conversation with a user about several topics ranging from movies to the news in an engaging and coherent way. In order to understand the entities mentioned by the user and to be able to provide interesting information about those, we relied on several Semantic Web Technologies such as the Amazon Neptune cluster for high-performance SPARQL query execution on a customised large-scale knowledge base composed of Wikidata and a fragment of the DBpedia ontology. In this talk, I will provide an overview of the system and I will describe how our system leverages the power of Linked Data in several components of the architecture.