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CMU Details 6 Years of Contributions to the National Science Foundation- Funded DialPort Project for Dialog Research

Carnegie Mellon University researchers provide background information and details on contributions to the DialPort project over the last six years in their new paper The DialPort Tools. These tools — such as the DialPort Portal and DialCrowd — will be demoed at the SIGDIAL 2022 conference next month in Edinburgh.

The DialPort project is funded by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and aims to develop free tools to fulfill the needs of the dialog research community. DialPort helps researchers gather high-quality data and enables access to and comparisons of dialogue systems.

In the new paper The DialPort tools, researchers from Carnegie Mellon University provide background information and details on the DialPort project contributions over the last six years. These tools — such as the DialPort Portal and DialCrowd — will be demoed at the SIGDIAL 2022 conference next month in Edinburgh.

The DialPort Portal was developed to facilitate the collection of flexible and evolving natural dialog data and interactive assessments by real users. One of its best-known use cases was connecting systems and collecting data for the Interactive Evaluation of Dialog track at the Ninth Dialog System Technology Challenge (DSTC9) in 2020.

Once data is collected from the DialPort Portal interface, the DialPort Dashboard can be used to analyze, filter and organize dialogs and enable users to compare their system with others.

DialCrowd, meanwhile, is a simple and accessible tool that assists with crowdsourcing. DialCrowd helps requesters create well-structured human intelligence tasks (HIT), so crowdsourced workers can provide more detailed and better annotations on the data collected from DialPort.

The researchers will showcase demos and provide examples for the DialPort Portal, Dashboard, and DialCrowd at SIGDIAL, showing how to connect a system, what interactions with each tool looks like, and the advantages these tools provide. SIGDIAL 2022 will be held September 7-9 at the Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, UK.

The demos are available on DialPort.org. The paper The DialPort tools is on arXiv.


Author: Hecate He | Editor: Michael Sarazen


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2 comments on “CMU Details 6 Years of Contributions to the National Science Foundation- Funded DialPort Project for Dialog Research

  1. jfrederiksen427

    Oh, that’s interesting, I believe that many entrepreneurs will look for employees with some knowledge of these tools after a while. Right now, it’s not that hard to find a good job offer on various websites, you can go now and check the platform that helped me with that a lot, but I believe that over time, employers will have more requirements.

    • I think after a while, many business owners will start looking for workers who have some familiarity with these technologies.

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