2018 Tutorial - Open-Domain Neural Dialogue Systems
Until recently, the goal of developing open-domain dialogue systems that not only emulate human conversation but fulfill complex tasks, such as travel planning, seemed elusive. However, we start to observe promising results in the last few years as the large amount of conversation data is available for training and the breakthroughs in deep learning and reinforcement learning are applied to dialogues.
In this tutorial, we start with a brief introduction to the history of dialogue research. Then, we describe in detail the deep learning and reinforcement learning technologies that have been developed for two types of dialogue systems. First is a task-oriented dialogue system that can help users accomplish tasks, ranging from meeting scheduling to vacation planning. Second is a social bot that can converse seamlessly and appropriately with humans. In the final part of the tutorial, we review attempts to developing open-domain neural dialogue systems by combining the strengths of task-oriented dialogue systems and social bots.
Slides