- Toby Jia-Jun Li, I. Labutov, B. Myers, A. Azaria, Alexander I. Rudnicky, Tom Michael Mitchell. 2017. An End User Development Approach for Failure Handling in Goal-oriented Conversational Agents. Abstract: This chapter introduces an end user development (EUD) approach for handling common types of failures encountered by goal-oriented conversational agents. We start with identifying three common sources of failures in human-agent conversations: unknown concepts , out-of-domain tasks and wrong fulﬁllment means or level of generalization in task execution . To handle these failures, it is useful to enable the end user to program the agent and to “teach” the agent what to do as a fallback strategy. Showing examples for this approach, we walk through our two integrated systems: S UGILITE and L IA . S UGILITE uses the programming by demonstration (PBD) technique, allowing the user to program the agent by demonstrating new tasks or new means for completing a task using the GUIs of third-party smart-phone apps, while L IA learns new tasks from verbal instructions, enabling the user to teach the agent through breaking down the procedure verbally. L IA also supports the user to verbally deﬁne unknown concepts used in the commands and adds those concepts into the agent’s ontology. Both S UGILITE and L IA can generalize what they have learned from the user across related entities and perform a task with new parameters in a different context.
