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The Dialog Exchange

Conversational agents are permeating our lives, from virtual assistants to smart home devices. Key to this is dialog. The AVIOS Advance Dialog group is bringing together the latest advances, products, and research and posting them here so you can follow what’s happening in this field which is changing the way we interact with the world.

Discourse and Dialog vol. 9 issue 1 articles

Discourse and Dialog announces the latest issue:

We are happy to announce that issue 1 of volume 9 of “Dialogue and Discourse” has been published, with the following excellent articles:

* A Survey of Available Corpora For Building Data-Driven Dialogue Systems: The Journal Version
Iulian Vlad Serban, Ryan Lowe, Peter Henderson, Laurent Charlin, Joelle Pineau

* Primary and secondary discourse connectives: definitions and lexicons
Laurence Danlos, Katerina Rysova, Magdalena Rysova, Manfred Stede

* Cross-domain analysis of discourse markers in European Portuguese
Vera Mónica Cabarrão, Helena Moniz, Fernando Batista, Jaime Ferreira, Isabel Trancoso, Ana Isabel Mata

* ChangeMyView Through Concessions: Do Concessions Increase Persuasion?
Elena Musi, Debanjan Ghosh, Smaranda Muresan

* Source vs. Stance: On the Relationship between Evidential and Modal Expressions
Sumeyra Tosun, Jyotsna Vaid

You can find the articles here: http://dad.uni-bielefeld.de/index.php/dad/issue/view/393

Consider submitting your work to the next issue! http://dialogue-and-discourse.org

– David Schlangen, for Dialogue & Discourse
http://dialogue-and-discourse.org/editors.shtml

Dialog Corpora

(more to be done here, just starting to collect)

The Ubuntu Corpus

The Twins Corpus

Settlers of Catan

ICSI Meeting Recorder

Ami Meeting Corpus

Annotation efforts in Dialog

The following are annotated corpora and the annotation guidelines for efforts annotating dialogs. This is just a sample. For some of these corpora there are multiple annotation efforts.

Dialog State Tracking Challenges

The dialog state tracking challenges are an effort to provide the research community with a framework to do comparable research by providing common testbeds and evaluation metrics.

Papers

Williams, Jason, et al. “The dialog state tracking challenge.” Proceedings of the SIGDIAL 2013 Conference. 2013.
Henderson, Matthew, Blaise Thomson, and Jason D. Williams. “The Second Dialog State Tracking Challenge.” SIGDIAL Conference. 2014.
Overview paper: Henderson, Matthew, Blaise Thomson, and Jason D. Williams. “The third dialog state tracking challenge.” Spoken Language Technology Workshop (SLT), 2014 IEEE. IEEE, 2014.
Kim, Seokhwan, et al. “The fourth dialog state tracking challenge.” Dialogues with Social Robots. Springer Singapore, 2017. 435-449

Sites

Link to the all of the DSCT sites
Dialog State Tracking Challenge 2 & 3 site
Dialog State Tracking Challenge 4 site
Dialog State Tracking Challenge 5 site

Brandeis summer program: Building Mobile Voice Applications

Brandeis’ JBS Program on Building Mobile Voice Applications is in full swing. (I’ll add more here)

The Alexa Prize

Amazon’s university competition to advance “conversational” dialog systems has attracted talent from around the world. This “channel” on the dialog exchange will provide some background on the teams and report on how they are doing. This paper describes the science of conversational AI behind the Alexa Prize.

Here’s the Alexa Prize site and here are the teams:

Unsponsored Teams

Brandeis University: DeisBot
Columbia University: Wallace
Emory University: Emerson
Harvard University: HarvardNLP
Seoul National University: Chatty Chat
University of Bonn: Krantikari

ICSI Meeting Recorder corpus

AMI Meeting Corpus

Settlers of Catan

ARRAU: Anaphora and Deictic reference in dialogs

Papers

Sites

Sponsored Teams

Unsponsored Teams