This paper applies contextualized word embedding models to a long-standing problem in the natural language parsing community, namely prepositional phrase attachment. Following past formulations of this problem, we use data sets in which the attachment decision is both a binary-valued choice as well as a multi-valued choice. We present a deep learning architecture that fine-tunes the output of a contextualized word embedding model for the purpose of predicting attachment decisions. We present experiments on two commonly used datasets that outperform the previous best results, using only the original training data and the unannotated full sentence context.

Athena 2.0 is an Alexa Prize SocialBot that has been a finalist in the last two Alexa Prize Grand Challenges. One reason for Athena’s success is its novel dialogue management strategy, which allows it to dynamically construct dialogues and responses from component modules, leading to novel conversations with every interaction. Here we describe Athena’s system design and performance in the Alexa Prize during the 20/21 competition. A live demo of Athena as well as video recordings will provoke discussion on the state of the art in conversational AI.