In Spring 2020, Computational Models of Discourse and Dialogue  will be focused on the topic of Dialogue Management and Natural Language Generation for  Open Domain Dialogue Systems, also called Conversational Agents or Chatbots. Dialogue Management concerns how a dialogue system makes decisions about what information it should keep track of to represent the context, what it should do next, what content it should access, and what dialogue policy it should follow when interacting with a human user.  Natural Language Generation concerns algorithms and methods that specify how a dialogue system actually generates  one or more candidate responses, given a particular dialogue context. We will be reading and discussing background readings, and recent papers on these topics. In addition to reading papers, writing summaries and discussing them in class, we will also be  examining and analyzing corpora of open domain conversations that are used for empirical research in this area. The course also requires students to develop a project proposal  and complete a project .  

The detailed syllabus for the course will be available on Canvas. The class will be held by Zoom with  zoom links available on Canvas.

Time: Class meets Monday and Wednesday from 5:20 to 6:55 PM.

Instructor

Professor Marilyn Walker
Email: mawalker@ucsc.edu

Teaching Assistant

Jurik Juraska
Email: jjuraska@ucsc.edu