Challenges in Building Highly-Interactive Dialog Systems

Nigel G. Ward, David DeVault

AI Magazine, volume 37, number 4, Winter 2016, pages 7-18.

Abstract: Systems capable of highly-interactive dialog have recently been developed in several domains. This paper considers how to build on these advances to make systems more robust, easier to develop, and more scientifically significant. We identify key challenges whose solution would lead to improvements in dialog systems and beyond.

Full Paper

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This paper is an extensively revised version of Ten Challenges in Highly-Interactive Dialog Systems (AAAI Symposium on Turn-taking and Coordination in Human-Machine Interaction, 2015), which it supersedes.

• Towards Situated Collaboration. Dan Bohus, Ece Kamar and Eric Horvitz. In NAACL-HLT Workshop on Future Directions and Needs in the Spoken Dialog Community, pp. 13--14, 2012.
• Directions for Research on Spoken Dialog Systems, Broadly Defined. Nigel G. Ward. in NAACL-HLT Workshop on Future Directions and Needs in the Spoken Dialog Community, 2012.
• The Challenge of Modeling Dialog Dynamics. Nigel G. Ward. Modeling Human Communication Dynamics Workshop at Neural Information Processing Systems 2010.
• Spontaneous Speech: How people really talk and why engineers should care. Elizabeth E. Shriberg. Interspeech, pp. 1781--1784.
• Towards Conversational Human-Computer Interaction. James F. Allen, Donna K. Byron, Myroslava Dzikovska, George Ferguson, Lucian Galescu and Amanda Stent AI Magazine, pp 27-37, Winter 2001.
• Conversational Interfaces: Advances and Challenges. Victor W. Zue and James R. Glass. Proceedings of the IEEE, 2000.
• The challenge of spoken language systems: Research directions for the Nineties. Ron Cole, Lynette Hirschman, Les Atlas, Mary Beckman, Alan Biermann, Marcia Bush, Mark Clements, L. Cohen, Oscar Garcia, Brian Hanson, et al. IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing. 3(1), pp 1-21, 1995.

More Context:

• The Dialog Technology Bibliography

Nigel Ward's Publications