Abstract
Almond is an extendible open-source virtual assistant designed to help people access Internet services and IoT (Internet of Things) devices. Both are referred to as skills here. Service providers can easily enable their devices for Almond by defining proper APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) for ThingTalk in Thingpedia. ThingTalk is a virtual assistant programming language, and Thingpedia is an application encyclopedia. Almond uses a large neural network to translate user commands in natural language into ThingTalk programs. To obtain enough data for the training of the neural network, Genie was developed to synthesize pairs of user commands and corresponding ThingTalk programs based on a natural language template approach. In this work, we extended Genie to support Chinese. For 107 devices and 261 functions registered in Thingpedia, 649 Chinese primitive templates and 292 Chinese construct templates were analyzed and developed. Two models, seq2seq (sequence-to-sequence) and MQAN (multiple question answer network), were trained to translate user commands in Chinese into ThingTalk programs. Both models were evaluated, and the experiment results showed that MQAN outperformed seq2seq. The exact match, BLEU, and F1 token accuracy of MQAN were 0.7, 0.82, and 0.88, respectively. As a result, users could use Chinese in Almond to access Internet services and IoT devices registered in Thingpedia.
Highlights
IntroductionPeople can use smartphones to access various Internet services, such as news websites and social networks, and to control smart appliances in the home, such as air conditioners, TVs, refrigerators, and so on
Internet services are becoming more and more mature, and fast evolving ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) consistently enhance our user experiences.Today, people can use smartphones to access various Internet services, such as news websites and social networks, and to control smart appliances in the home, such as air conditioners, TVs, refrigerators, and so on
We built a Chinese primitive template dataset for all 107 skills devices and 261 functions registered in Thingpedia
Summary
People can use smartphones to access various Internet services, such as news websites and social networks, and to control smart appliances in the home, such as air conditioners, TVs, refrigerators, and so on. With help from virtual assistants, people can use natural language to access Internet services and control. Gordon and Breazeal proposed a car entertainment assistant [4] It aimed to help drivers interact with their children in the back seats and prevent them from distraction. It was designed for children’s entertainment in a car. Several giant companies have developed IoT assistants for their own smart devices and cloud services, such as Amazon Alexa [7,8], Apple Homekit [9], OpenWeave (Google Weave previously) [10], and Samsung SmartThings [11].
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