Course overview for the Project Conversational Agents
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This page contains all pertinent project information. Go through it section by section to find out how to succeed in this course and find any relevant details you need to successfully complete this project.
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At the start of the project, you are provided with a Prolog database of close to 1,000 recipes and an agent template to get started. You will need to develop 10 basic capabilities for your conversational agent, each of which will provide the agent with a basic understanding of what a user says, of how to organize the conversation, and what to show when to a user during the interaction. While developing your agent, it will be important to continuously and systematically test it and improve it based on your findings. This should result in a working agent, but it will still be pretty basic…
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Therefore, after implementing the first 10 agent capabilities, you You are challenged to extend your agent with your own flare and ideas (with our assistance), which will enable you to earn a higher grade. At the end of this project, you and your team should have a fully functioning conversational agent that can assist users by recommending a recipe they would like to cook!
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The project course Conversational Agents (code XB_0101) runs in period 3 (Jan to Feb 20242025). Lectures each week are scheduled on Tuesdays from 13:30 to 15:15 in the Theater 1 NU building and Thursdays from 13:30 -to 15:15 in WNMF-KC137FG2.
Practical sessions are scheduled each week on Tuesdays from 15:30 -to 19:15 and Fridays from 9:00-1213:30 to 17:15.
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It is obligatory for all members of the group to attend the practical sessions. Not being present will lead to you failing to pass this courseAttendance at all practical sessions is mandatory. Missing sessions without prior approval will result in failure of the course. Rules:
If You Cannot Attend:
Consequences:Failure to comply with these rules will result in course failure, regardless of performance in other areas. Take this seriously, no exceptions will be made. |
Go here for the detailed Course Schedule.
Communication & Contact policy
For communication throughout this project course, we will use Discord. Using the project’s Discord server, you can communicate about and work on the project assignment outside classroom hours, with your team members, fellow students, and teaching assistants. For each group, we will create a group channel. In your group channel, you can privately talk with the other students in your group and your TA (no one else will have access).
Your group’s Teaching Assistant is your main point of contact for any questions you have about the course and the assignment. Discord is also the way for you to communicate with your TA.
For questions about the project course itself and for the project assignment, we have created two forum channels for these two topics. Within each of these channels, you can post your questions and/or find previously given answers to questions asked by other students.
If your question is not replied to (by other students or any of the TAs), then contact your own TA. If you have any other issues to report, always first contact your group’s TA via Discord. use Canvas Discussion Boards between practical sessions. These will be answered on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays.
Your main point of contact and question-answering will be during the 4 hour-long practical sessions on Tuesdays and Fridays. This is where most concerns will be handled about project content.
For group, organizational, or absence-related issues please contact [Instructor’s Email].
If the question or issue cannot be resolved with your TA, ask your TA to take this up with us. Only if after that you still have not received any response within a reasonable time (within a week that means), send the teachers a mail.
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Inclusivity Statement
We strive to offer students a safe and inclusive classroom environment. We welcome the perspective of students of all ethnicities, genders, spiritual beliefs, and sexual orientations, among others. If you feel discriminated based on your identity, please report it to the course staff.
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You will be working on the main project assignment together in a group of 6 students. We will assign a teaching assistant (TA) to each group. Your TA will also monitor whether each of you individually sufficiently contributes to the deliverables. Individual contribution and participation in the course are required to pass the course. Enroll your group members on Canvas in a group.
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Preliminaries and Quiz Materials
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Section Goal: Individually understand all concepts and tools described on the background knowledge pages. Memorizing every detail is not necessary, but you should have a decent understanding. |
Before you begin this project, please make sure that you understand the relevant background knowledge that you will need throughout the project. The background knowledge you need concerns the use of the git version control system, Google’s Dialogflow to transcribe and understand spoken natural language, Prolog for managing the dialog and reasoning about recipes, and the basics of HTML and Bootstrap to create a visually appealing webpage. You can learn about this as a team, but every member of your team must at least have a basic understanding of all of these concepts. You will also need this background knowledge to complete a few (see also the Course Schedule). So, to get up to speed, check out thePreliminaries!
Quiz
Project Installation
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Section Goal: Make sure your team members all have completed the installation. Each of you must have completed the installation to participate. Do not rely upon a team member to run certain software. |
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The core of this project surrounds building a recipe recommendation agent as a team. There are three kinds of different tasks that you will encounter:
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Tasks focused on Dialogue Patterns |
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Tasks focused on the Visual Support |
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Tasks focused on Dialogflow and speech recognition and understanding (ASR, NLU)Recipe Filtering |
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Tasks focused on Prolog dialog patterns and recipe matching (logic)Report Writing |
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Tasks focused on the visual support (screen) the user seesIntent/Slot Classification |
We encourage you to work on these assignments as a team as much as possible. Each step in building your agent tasks you with developing a new “Agent Capability” and completing the tasks associated with each capability will provide your agent with the ability to do something new. All three task types must be completed using the instructions in each corresponding section in order to complete the overall task of providing your agent with a new capability. Also, everyone in your team must (to a reasonable extent) understand all three task types and the work done within them. Throughout the project go here for instructions on
Testing
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Section Goal: Prepare for pilot testing sessions for the final evaluation of your agent. |
Testing your conversational agent continuously is very important during the project. Each week you should collect, analyze, and submit data about how your agent is performing (check out the Course Schedule). Your analysis of that data will help to improve your agent. However, testing your own agent yourself is not good enough because developers are not the best testers of their own software. To make your agent perform robustly with arbitrary users, you should also conduct at least some more structured tests with users to get insight into how robust your agent really is. You can already get started with this from early on in the project by involving other users from outside your team (e.g., your friends, family, or students not part of your team) and asking them to interact with your agent. You will find that if you do this you will learn a lot about what needs to be improved and how you can improve your agent. In any case, at the end of this project, you will need to conduct pilot testing sessions where you and another team shall be paired to test each others' agents. You need to report on the findings from these sessions in your final report. You can read more about how to prepare for these sessions in the Agent Testing and Pilot User Study section.
How to pass the course, deliverables & grading
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Completed the Project Installation on your own device/laptop.Signed up to the project’s Discord server with your own name (and not a nickname).
Signed up to the project’s GitHub classroom and actively contributed to your group’s repository, see Commits.
Participated in the mandatory lab sessions twice a week, as also listed on the Course Schedule.
Kept your individual Log book up to date by updating and committing it to your GitHub repo at least once every week; your log book needs to show you actively participated in the course.
Completed individually all the Canvas quizzes related to the materials provided to you.
Submitted as a team all Project Deliverables before the project’s deadline.
Assessment and Grading
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Your coursework is only assessed, and you will only receive a grade if all the requirements listed above are met.
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The work is graded with a mark from 0-100. There must be a minimum of 55 to pass the course.
Individuals may be rewarded a higher or lower grade than the group based on their effort and their contribution to the teamwork. We will among other things use your log books for this purpose.
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