Dialog as a Vehicle for Lifelong Learning
This addresses the challenge of enabling continuous learning in dialog systems for applications like robotics, but it is incremental as it builds on prior work and discusses existing challenges.
The paper proposes designing dialog systems for lifelong learning, particularly for physically situated robots, to acquire knowledge that improves underlying language understanding or other machine learning systems.
Dialog systems research has primarily been focused around two main types of applications - task-oriented dialog systems that learn to use clarification to aid in understanding a goal, and open-ended dialog systems that are expected to carry out unconstrained "chit chat" conversations. However, dialog interactions can also be used to obtain various types of knowledge that can be used to improve an underlying language understanding system, or other machine learning systems that the dialog acts over. In this position paper, we present the problem of designing dialog systems that enable lifelong learning as an important challenge problem, in particular for applications involving physically situated robots. We include examples of prior work in this direction, and discuss challenges that remain to be addressed.