An Introduction to Dialogue Systems

Abstract: We live in a "Post App Era" where Conversation would be the next interface! An artificial agent having the ability to communicate like humans is believed to be one major step towards realizing Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). The multi-fold increase in the use of conversational dialogue systems and its research incorporating all innovations of neural networks and linguistic models in the recent years has led to huge investment from industry that now see potential in multifarious applications and development of end to end tool-kits. This introductory talk started off with the applications, basic concepts and gradually moved towards the advanced topics in Dialogue Systems (not limiting to Deep Learning), the key players and the current research gaps. Finally to conclude, I discussed one such approach towards building an end to end Dynamic Dialogue System.