132 - Alexa Prize Socialbot Grand Challenge and Alquist 4.0, with Petr Marek

In this episode, we discussed the Alexa Prize Socialbot Grand Challenge and this year's winning submission, Alquist 4.0, with Petr Marek, a member of the winning team. Petr gave us an overview of their submission, the design choices that led to them winning the competition, including combining a hardcoded dialog tree and a neural generator model and extracting implicit personal information about users from their responses, and some outstanding challenges. Petr Marek is a PhD student at the Czech Technical University in Prague. More about the Alexa Prize challenges: https://developer.amazon.com/alexaprize Technical report on Alquist 4.0: https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.07968