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Tartan: A taskbot that assists with recipes and do-it-yourself projects

By Carnegie Mellon University

2022

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Tartan is a multi-domain task-oriented bot that assists users with two different tasks: 1. cooking with recipes from Whole Foods and 2. doing projects from WikiHow. The bot’s system is divided into two stages. In the first stage, the bot assists the user in identifying a task that they want to do. In the second stage, the bot guides the users through sequences of step-by-step instructions. We developed several machine learning based components to guide the bot, including a domain classifier, named entity extractor, and question answering module. The core of the system is a dialogue manager. The dialogue manager guides a user’s session, referencing information from the aforementioned components. Primarily, the dialogue manager is rule-based, necessitated by the lack of domain-specific data available to it. We describe our systems and provide observations on its behavior.

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