Back to the Future for Dialogue Research

This “blue sky” paper argues that future conversational systems that can engage in multiparty, collaborative dialogues will require a more fundamental approach than existing technology. This paper identifies significant limitations of the state of the art, and argues that our returning to the plan-based approach to dialogue will provide a stronger foundation. Finally, I suggest a research strategy that couples neural network-based semantic parsing with plan-based reasoning in order to build a collaborative dialogue manager.