Widening the Dialogue Workflow Modeling Bottleneck in Ontology-Based Personal Assistants

We present a new approach to dialogue specification for Virtual Personal Assistants (VPAs) based on so-called dialogue workflow graphs, with several demonstrated advantages over current ontology-based methods. Our new dialogue specification language (DSL) enables customers to more easily participate in the VPA modeling process due to a user-friendly modeling framework. Resulting models are also significantly more compact. VPAs can be developed much more rapidly. The DSL is a new modeling layer on top of our ontology-based Dialogue Management (DM) framework OntoVPA. We explain the rationale and benefits behind the new language and support our claims with concrete reduced Level-of-Effort (LOE) numbers from two recent OntoVPA projects.

Query Answering in Object Oriented Knowledge Bases in Logic Programming: Description and Challenge for ASP

Research on developing efficient and scalable ASP solvers can substantially benefit by the availability of data sets to experiment with. KB_Bio_101 contains knowledge from a biology textbook, has been developed as part of Project Halo, and has recently become available for research use. KB_Bio_101 is one of the largest KBs available in ASP and the reasoning with it is undecidable in general. We give a description of this KB and ASP programs for a suite of queries that have been of practical interest. We explain why these queries pose significant practical challenges for the current ASP solvers.