Conversational agents are exploding in popularity. However, much work remains in the area
of social conversation as well as free-form conversation over a broad range of domains and …

To advance the state of the art in conversational AI, Amazon launched the Alexa Prize, a 2.5
million dollar competition that challenges university teams to build conversational agents, or" …

During the past decade, several areas of speech and language understanding have
witnessed substantial breakthroughs from the use of data-driven models. In the area of …

Existing dialog datasets contain a sequence of utterances and responses without any
explicit background knowledge associated with them. This has resulted in the development …

Deep reinforcement learning has recently shown many impressive successes. However,
one major obstacle towards applying such methods to real-world problems is their lack of …

We study conversational domain exploration (CODEX), where the user's goal is to enrich her
knowledge of a given domain by conversing with an informative bot. Such conversations …

Conversational artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming an increasingly popular topic among
industry and academia. With the fast development of neural network-based models, a lot of …

Coherence is the quality that gives a text its conceptual unity, making a text a coordinated
set of connected parts rather than a random group of sentences (turns, in the case of …

To build Sounding Board, we develop a system architecture that is capable of
accommodating dialog strategies that we designed for socialbot conversations. The …

We study the features crucial for a companion robot conceptual processing and suggest a
practical implementation of a cognitive architecture that support these features while …