Generating Dialogue Agents via Automated Planning
  Dialogue systems have many applications such as customer support or question
answering. Typically they have been limited to shallow single turn
interactions. However more advanced applications such as career coaching or
planning a trip require a much more complex multi-turn dialogue. Current
limitations of conversational systems have made it difficult to support
applications that require personalization, customization and context dependent
interactions. We tackle this challenging problem by using domain-independent AI
planning to automatically create dialogue plans, customized to guide a dialogue
towards achieving a given goal. The input includes a library of atomic dialogue
actions, an initial state of the dialogue, and a goal. Dialogue plans are
plugged into a dialogue system capable to orchestrate their execution. Use
cases demonstrate the viability of the approach. Our work on dialogue planning
has been integrated into a product, and it is in the process of being deployed
into another.
