Conversational Agents For Complex Collaborative Tasks

Dialogue is a very active area o f research currently, both in developing new computational techniques for robust dialogue systems and in the active fielding of commercial conversational assistants such as Apple's Sin and Amazon's Alexa. This article argues that, while current techniques can be used to design effective dialogue-based systems for very simple tasks, they are unlikely to generalize to conversational interfaces that enhance human ability to solve complex tasks by interacting with artificial intelligence reasoning and modeling systems. We explore some of the challenges of tackling such complex tasks and describe a dialogue model designed to meet these challenges. We illustrate our approach with examples of several implemented systems that use this framework.