Conversational Agents
by Christian Huyck

This talk will be about conversational agents, a bit about the work 
Ian Kenny and I have done on a conversational games agent, some
work that Ian and I have proposed to do, and some work that Gill Whitney,
John Cook and I proposed on a conversational tutorial agent.

Conversational agents must have linguistic abilities.  I will discuss
existing Natural Language Understanding and Generation work, particularly
my NL Parsing system Plink.  However, most existing NL work is based
on text; a new range of behaviour is needed for conversation.  

Conversational agents vary in complexity and domain.  Even slightly
complex agents need to handle multiple goals, turn taking, and
clarification.  Beyond this, agents of moderate complexity need to
be tailored to the specific domain.  I will discuss how this tailoring
can progress and how much of the systems might be reused.

Finally, there is a long way to go in conversational agent research.
AI researchers will not be solving the Turing Test anytime soon.
However, this means that there are many possiblities for
collaboration.  I look forward to discussing possible collaboration
with the audience.