PyDial

The Cambridge University Python Multi-domain Statistical Dialogue System Toolkit

Welcome to the PyDial website. PyDial is an open-source end-to-end statistical spoken dialogue system toolkit which provides implementations of statistical approaches for all dialogue system modules. Moreover, it has been extended to provide multi-domain conversational functionality. It offers easy configuration, easy extensibility, and domain-independent implementations of the respective dialogue system modules.

PyDial is a scientific system developed for scientific purposes and actively used for research by the Dialogue Systems Group at the University of Cambridge. Although we put great effort into designing clean interfaces and easily understandable structures, some the code will not necessarily be up to commercial standards. As it is used activly by our reserach group, the code may also change in the future. However, the core intefaces have been designed in a way that there should not be any need to change them.

To see PyDial in action, talk to Dialport, a web-based virtual dialogue portal, about restaurants in Cambridge.

To cite PyDial, please use the following paper: 

@InProceedings{ultes2017pydial,
  author    = {Ultes, Stefan  and  Rojas Barahona, Lina M.  and  Su, Pei-Hao  and  Vandyke, David  and  Kim, Dongho  and  Casanueva, I\~{n}igo  and  Budzianowski, Pawe{\l}  and  Mrk\v{s}i\'{c}, Nikola  and  Wen, Tsung-Hsien  and  Gasic, Milica  and  Young, Steve},
  title     = {{PyDial: A Multi-domain Statistical Dialogue System Toolkit}},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of ACL 2017, System Demonstrations},
  month     = {July},
  year      = {2017},
  address   = {Vancouver, Canada},
  publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
  pages     = {73--78},
  url       = {http://aclweb.org/anthology/P17-4013}
}

PyDial is distributed under Apache 2.0 License.

The following current and former group members have contributed to PyDial (in alphabetical order):

  • Paweł Budzianowski
  • Iñigo Casanueva
  • Milica Gašić
  • Dongho Kim
  • Nikola Mrkšić
  • Lina Rojas-Barahona
  • Stefan Ultes
  • Pei-Hao Su
  • David Vandyke
  • Gellert Weisz
  • Tsung-Hsien Wen
  • Steve Young