Designing multilingual interactive agents using small dialogue corpora

Interactive dialogue agents like smart speakers have become more and more popular in recent years. These agents are being developed on machine learning technologies that use huge amounts of language resources. However, many entities in specialized fields are struggling to develop their own interactive agents due to a lack of language resources such as dialogue corpora, especially when the end users need interactive agents that offer multilingual support. Therefore, we aim at providing a general design framework for multilingual interactive agents in specialized domains that, it is assumed, have small or non-existent dialogue corpora. To achieve our goal, we first integrate and customize external language services for supporting multilingual functions of interactive agents. Then, we realize context-aware dialogue generation under the situation of small corpora. Third, we develop a gradual design process for acquiring dialogue corpora and improving the interactive agents. We implement a multilingual interactive agent in the field of healthcare and conduct experiments to illustrate the effectiveness of the implemented agent.