ChaD: Chat-oriented dialog systems

Abstract

Historically, conversational systems have focused on goal-directed interaction and this focus defined much of the work in the field of spoken dialog systems. More recently researchers have started to focus on non- goal-oriented dialog systems often referred to as “chat” systems. We refer to these as Chat-oriented Dialog (ChaD) systems. ChaD systems are not task-oriented and focus on what could be described as social conversation where the goal is to interact with a human interlocutor while maintaining an appropriate level of engagement. Research to date has identified a number of techniques that can be used to implement working ChaDs but it has also highlighted important limitations. This note describes key ChaD characteristics and proposes a research agenda.