Back to the Future for Dialogue Research: A Position Paper
It addresses methodological issues in dialogue research for the AI community, but is incremental as it builds on existing critiques and opinions.
The paper critiques current dialogue research approaches and proposes a collaborative roadmap, drawing on 40 years of experience without presenting new experimental results or concrete numbers.
This short position paper is intended to provide a critique of current approaches to dialogue, as well as a roadmap for collaborative dialogue research. It is unapologetically opinionated, but informed by 40 years of dialogue re-search. No attempt is made to be comprehensive. The paper will discuss current research into building so-called "chatbots", slot-filling dialogue systems, and plan-based dialogue systems. For further discussion of some of these issues, please see (Allen et al., in press).