Mixed-initiative conversational system using question-answer pairs mined from the web.

One of the biggest bottlenecks for conversational systems is large-scale provision of suitable content. Our approach readily provides this without the need for custom-crafting. In this demonstration, we present the use of question-answer (QA) pairs mined from online question-and-answer websites to construct system utterances for a conversational agent. Our system uses QA pairs to formulate utterances that drive a conversation in addition to the answering of user questions as has been done in previous work. We use a collection of strategies that specify how and when the different parts of our question-answer pairs can be used and augmented with a small number of generic hand-crafted text snippets to generate natural and coherent system utterances.