Conversation modelling for chatbots: current approaches and future directions

Authors: Michael McTear

Abstract:

Chatbots have emerged as a new way to interact with services on the web and with smart devices, providing conversational interfaces that are ostensibly more intuitive and more natural than traditional user interfaces. This paper examines the conversation models of the main chatbot frameworks and assesses the extent to which they model important conversational phenomena such as follow-up questions, changes of topic, out-of-scope utterances, and other conversational phenomena. The paper concludes by considering research directions for intelligent conversational agents of the future.