Open-Domain Conversational Agents: Current Progress, Open Problems, and Future Directions

We present our view of what is necessary to build an engaging open-domain conversational agent: covering the qualities of such an agent, the pieces of the puzzle that have been built so far, and the gaping holes we have not filled yet. We present a biased view, focusing on work done by our own group, while citing related work in each area. In particular, we discuss in detail the properties of continual learning, providing engaging content, and being well-behaved -- and how to measure success in providing them. We end with a discussion of our experience and learnings, and our recommendations to the community.

Machine Common Sense Concept Paper

This paper summarizes some of the technical background, research ideas, and possible development strategies for achieving machine common sense. Machine common sense has long been a critical-but-missing component of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Recent advances in machine learning have resulted in new AI capabilities, but in all of these applications, machine reasoning is narrow and highly specialized. Developers must carefully train or program systems for every situation. General commonsense reasoning remains elusive. The absence of common sense prevents intelligent systems from understanding their world, behaving reasonably in unforeseen situations, communicating naturally with people, and learning from new experiences. Its absence is perhaps the most significant barrier between the narrowly focused AI applications we have today and the more general, human-like AI systems we would like to build in the future. Machine common sense remains a broad, potentially unbounded problem in AI. There are a wide range of strategies that could be employed to make progress on this difficult challenge. This paper discusses two diverse strategies for focusing development on two different machine commonsense services: (1) a service that learns from experience, like a child, to construct computational models that mimic the core domains of child cognition for objects (intuitive physics), agents (intentional actors), and places (spatial navigation); and (2) service that learns from reading the Web, like a research librarian, to construct a commonsense knowledge repository capable of answering natural language and image-based questions about commonsense phenomena.