Open-Domain Conversational Agents: Current Progress, Open Problems, and Future Directions

Further, we discuss only open academic research with entertaining wit and knowledge while making others feel reproducible published results, hence we will not address heard. The breadth of possible conversation topics and lack much of the considerable work that has been put into building of a well-defined objective make it challenging to define a commercial systems, where methods, data and results roadmap towards training a good conversational agent, or are not in the public domain. Finally, given that we focus on chatbot. Despite recent progress across the board (Adiwardana open-domain conversation, we do not focus on specific goaloriented et al., 2020; Roller et al., 2020), conversational agents techniques; we also do not cover spoken dialogue in are still incapable of carrying an open-domain conversation this work, focusing on text and image input/output only. For that remains interesting, consistent, accurate, and reliably more general recent surveys, see Gao et al. (2019); Jurafsky well-behaved (e.g., not offensive) while navigating a variety and Martin (2019); Huang, Zhu, and Gao (2020). of topics. Traditional task-oriented dialogue systems rely on slotfilling and structured modules (e.g., Young et al. (2013); Gao et al. (2019); Jurafsky and Martin (2019)).