Jaeyoung Park


2019

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PyOpenDial: A Python-based Domain-Independent Toolkit for Developing Spoken Dialogue Systems with Probabilistic Rules
Youngsoo Jang | Jongmin Lee | Jaeyoung Park | Kyeng-Hun Lee | Pierre Lison | Kee-Eung Kim
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP): System Demonstrations

We present PyOpenDial, a Python-based domain-independent, open-source toolkit for spoken dialogue systems. Recent advances in core components of dialogue systems, such as speech recognition, language understanding, dialogue management, and language generation, harness deep learning to achieve state-of-the-art performance. The original OpenDial, implemented in Java, provides a plugin architecture to integrate external modules, but lacks Python bindings, making it difficult to interface with popular deep learning frameworks such as Tensorflow or PyTorch. To this end, we re-implemented OpenDial in Python and extended the toolkit with a number of novel functionalities for neural dialogue state tracking and action planning. We describe the overall architecture and its extensions, and illustrate their use on an example where the system response model is implemented with a recurrent neural network.