Hybrid Procedural Semantics for Visual Dialogue: An Interactive Web Demonstration

Visual dialogue refers to the task in which a conversational agent needs to hold a meaningful and coherent conversation with a human interlocutor about a scene they observe. To tackle this task, we introduce a novel methodology that makes use of (i) a novel data structure, called the conversation memory, which holds information that is incrementally conveyed in the conversation and (ii) a hybrid procedural semantic representation that is grounded in both the visual input and the conversation memory. In this paper, we present a demonstration that showcases this novel methodology. In this demonstration, a user can interact with a visual dialogue agent and discuss an image of their choice. While the agent is answering questions, the user can follow the agent’s reasoning process. Due to its explainable and interpretable nature, the novel methodology can be used in a wide range of application domains, especially when it is important that the system is human-interpretable. We believe that this novel methodology of hybrid procedural semantics combined with a conversation memory paves the way for building truly intelligent and explainable systems that are able to hold human-like conversations.