In this demonstration paper we showcase an extensible and reusable pipeline for automatic paraphrase generation , i.e., reformulating sentences using different words. Capturing the nuances of human language is fundamental to the effectiveness of Conversational AI systems, as it allows them to deal with the different ways users can utter their requests in natural language. Traditional approaches to utterance paraphrasing acquisition, such as hiring experts or crowd-sourcing, involve processes that are often costly or time consuming, and with their own trade-offs in terms of quality. Automatic paraphrasing is emerging as an attractive alternative that promises a fast, scalable and cost-effective process. In this paper we showcase how our extensible and reusable pipeline for automated utterance paraphrasing can support the development of Conversational AI systems by integrating and extending existing techniques under an unified and configurable framework.

Conversational services are emerging as a new paradigm for accessing information by simply uttering questions in natural language, posing a whole new set of challenges to the design and engineering of information systems. Training conversational services to deal with the nuances of natural language often requires collecting a high-quality and diverse set of training samples (i.e., paraphrases). Traditional approaches such as hiring an expert or crowdsourcing involve data collection processes that are often costly and time-consuming. Automated paraphrase generation is a promising cost-effective and scalable approach to generating training samples. Current automatic techniques, however, tend to specialise in specific types of lexical or syntactic variations. As a result, generated paraphrases may not perform well in relevant quality aspects such as diversity and semantic relatedness. In this paper, we follow an approach inspired by services integration to address these issues and generate paraphrases in English that are semantically relevant and diverse. We propose an extensible and reusable pipeline that combines automatic paraphrasing techniques in a two-step process that first focus on i) leveraging the strengths of multiple techniques to generate the most diverse (and possibly noisy) set of paraphrases, to then ii) address common quality issues in a separate step. Through empirical evaluations we show the benefits of the two-step process design and of combining techniques for more balancing relevance and diversity.

Task-oriented conversational assistants are in very high demand these days. They employ third-party APIs to serve end-users via natural language interactions and improve their productivity. Recently, the augmentation of process-enabled automation with conversational assistants emerged as a promising technology to make process automation closer to users. This paper focuses on the superimposition of task-oriented assistants over composite services. We propose a Human-bot-Process interaction acts that are relevant to represent natural language conversations between the user and multi-step processes. In doing so, we enable human users to perform tasks by naturally interacting with processes.

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