Edinburgh Napier University

  Conversational systems aim to generate responses that are accurate, relevant and engaging, either through utilising neural end-to-end models or through slot filling. Human-to-human conversations are enhanced by not only the latest utterance of the interlocutor, but also by recalling relevant information about concepts/objects covered in the dialogue and integrating them into their responses. Such information may contain recent referred concepts, commonsense knowledge and more. A concrete scenario of such dialogues is the cooking scenario, i.e. when an artificial agent (personal assistant, robot, chatbot) and a human converse about a recipe. We will demo a novel system for commonsense enhanced response generation in the scenario of cooking, where the conversational system is able to not only provide directions for cooking step-by-step, but also display commonsense capabilities by offering explanations of how objects can be used and provide recommendations for replacing ingredients.