Intent identification is one of the most critical components in conversational agent design. Conversational agent “is any dialogue system that not only conducts natural language processing but also responds automatically using human language.” (Conversational Agent, 2019). The crux of designing human-like conversational agent is to mimic how human understands another human and then responds “naturally”. The current study attempts to answer the fundamental question: how to model human processes of understanding another human? In order to answer that question, it starts from exploring some basic concepts relevant to intent identification from Conversation Analysis (CA). CA is a mature field that studies authentic human interaction. The basic concepts from CA are then synthesised into a model that potentially fit to existing framework and paradigm in conversational agent design, i.e. Natural Conversation Framework (NCF) and Intent-Entity-Context-Response (IECR) paradigm. Instead of using a made-up sentence, the model is then tested to an authentic conversational turn seksi sekali dirimu ‘you’re very sexy’. The test shows that the model is able to detect several possible intents contain in this authentic conversational turn. The model is also able to handle Conversational Indonesian and multi-modality. Considering the versatility of Conversation Analysis, in all likelihood the model will be able to handle any language and all kinds of modalities. Future study can be done to analyse more Conversational Indonesian data (to develop library of intent for Conversational Indonesian Language), as well as conversational data from different languages and conversational data containing diverse modalities.
An approach to conversational agent design using semantic sentence similarity
