DADA 2016

A dialog system is a computational agent that engages in interactions with humans which spans over multiple turns or sentences using human language in form of speech or text. Over the last few years dialog systems have been gaining increasing interest in research and business spheres. Dialog systems are widely used for customer services responding to questions about products and services, help desks catering to internal employee questions, financial advisors answering questions about investments and taxes, website navigation to guide customers to relevant portions of complex websites, guided selling by providing assistance in sales process, and technical support for diagnosis and troubleshooting in call centres. More recent trends have been seeing emergence of ubiquitous personal assistants such as Apple's Siri, Google's Google Now, Amazon Echo, Microsoft's Cortana, Braina (application developed by Brainasoft for Microsoft Windows), Samsung's S Voice, LG's Voice Mate, BlackBerry's Assistant, SILVIA, HTC's Hidi, IBM's Watson_(computer), and Facebook's M. Generally, these systems are developed for a specific application handling a particular class of interaction, they are expected to evolve with significant dialog capability over the next few years. Research in dialog systems has focused on the semantics and pragmatics of dialog, hand-crafted designs, computational linguistics, evaluation of dialog systems, and standardization across research community. Dialog systems across different applications encounter huge variability in the nature of task/application (e.g.