Towards Designing Conversational Agent Systems

Abstract

Conversation is interactive communication between two and more people which enhances knowledge among these people. It is key to exchange thoughts and ideas while listening to each other. Based on this idea the advances in artificial intelligence started to develop technologies in which computer can communicate with human in a more natural way. A computer program which acts as an automated conversation agent is also called as a Chatbot. Chatbots are useful in many different applications like health care, education, financial marketing, banking, agriculture, etc. This paper presents a survey on different issues in designing conversational agents. The paper discusses the types and applications of Chatbot; it lists research challenges while designing and implementing these systems. The paper presents a study and comparison of different techniques like NLP (Natural Language Processing), Deep Learning and Neural Networks used for designing these systems. The paper also presents various datasets being used by popular Chatbots in the industry. The paper ends by summarizing scope for future work in this domain.