Creating Conversations: An Automated Dialog System

Abstract

Online news sites often include a comments section where readers are allowed to leave their thoughts. These comments often contain interesting and insightful conversations between readers about the news article. However the richness of these conversations is often lost among other meaningless comments, and moreover all comments are found at the bottom of the web page. In this article, we discuss how our system inserts reader conversations into the news article to create a multimedia presentation called Shout Out. Shout Out features two virtual news anchors: one anchor reads the news and when appropriate the anchor pauses to have a conversation about the news with another anchor. This current iteration of Shout Out combines natural language techniques and reader conversations to create an engaging system.