A team of six Emory computer science students are helping to usher in a new era in artificial intelligence. They've developed a chatbot capable of making logical inferences that aims to hold deeper, more nuanced conversations with humans than have previously been possible. They've christened their chatbot "Emora," because it sounds like a feminine version of "Emory" and is similar to a Hebrew word for an eloquent sage. The team is now refining their new approach to conversational AI -- a logic-based framework for dialogue management that can be scaled to conduct real-life conversations. Their longer-term goal is to use Emora to assist first-year college students, helping them to navigate a new way of life, deal with day-to-day issues and guide them to proper human contacts and other resources when needed.

Inspired by studies on the overwhelming presence of experience-sharing in human-human conversations, Emora, the social chatbot developed by Emory University, aims to bring such experience-focused interaction to the current field of conversational AI. The traditional approach of information-sharing topic handlers is balanced with a focus on opinion-oriented exchanges that Emora delivers, and new conversational abilities are developed that support dialogues that consist of a collaborative understanding and learning process of the partner's life experiences. We present a curated dialogue system that leverages highly expressive natural language templates, powerful intent classification, and ontology resources to provide an engaging and interesting conversational experience to every user.