When traveling to a foreign country, we are often in dire need of an intelligent conversational agent to provide instant and informative responses to our various queries. However, to build such a travel agent is non-trivial. First of all, travel naturally involves several sub-tasks such as hotel reservation, restaurant recommendation and taxi booking etc, which invokes the need for global topic control. Secondly, the agent should consider various constraints like price or distance given by the user to recommend an appropriate venue. In this paper, we present a Deep Conversational Recommender (DCR) and apply to travel. It augments the sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) models with a neural latent topic component to better guide response generation and make the training easier. To consider the various constraints for venue recommendation, we leverage a graph convolutional network (GCN) based approach to capture the relationships between different venues and the match between venue and dialog context. For response generation, we combine the topic-based component with the idea of pointer networks, which allows us to effectively incorporate recommendation results. We perform extensive evaluation on a multi-turn task-oriented dialog dataset in travel domain and the results show that our method achieves superior performance as compared to a wide range of baselines.
 In this paper, we describe how a research spoken dialog system was made available to the general public. The Let’s Go Public spoken dialog system provides bus schedule information to the Pittsburgh population during off-peak times. This paper describes the changes necessary to make the system usable for the general public and presents analysis of the calls and strategies we have used to ensure high performance. In a spoken dialog system, determining which action a machine should take in a given situation is a difficult problem because automatic speech recognition is unreliable and hence the state of the conversation can never be known with certainty. Much of the research in spoken dialog systems centres on mitigating this uncertainty and recent work has focussed on three largely disparate techniques: parallel dialog state hypotheses, local use of confidence scores, and automated planning. While in isolation each of these approaches can improve action selection, taken together they currently lack a unified statistical framework that admits global optimization. In this paper we cast a spoken dialog system as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP). We show how this formulation unifies and extends existing techniques to form a single principled framework. A number of illustrations are used to show qualitatively the potential benefits of POMDPs compared to existing techniques, and empirical results from dialog simulations are presented which demonstrate significant quantitative gains. Finally, some of the key challenges to advancing this method - in particular scalability - are briefly outlined. Statistical dialog systems (SDSs) are motivated by the need for a data-driven framework that reduces the cost of laboriously handcrafting complex dialog managers and that provides robustness against the errors created by speech recognizers operating in noisy environments. By including an explicit Bayesian model of uncertainty and by optimizing the policy via a reward-driven process, partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) provide such a framework. However, exact model representation and optimization is computationally intractable. Hence, the practical application of POMDP-based systems requires efficient algorithms and carefully constructed approximations. This review article provides an overview of the current state of the art in the development of POMDP-based spoken dialog systems. We have proposed an expandable dialog scenario description and platform to manage dialog systems using a weighted finite-state transducer (WFST) in which user concept and system action tags are input and output of the transducer, respectively. In this paper, we apply this framework to statistical dialog management in which a dialog strategy is acquired from a corpus of human-to-human conversation for hotel reservation. A scenario WFST for dialog management was automatically created from an N-gram model of a tag sequence that was annotated in the corpus with Interchange Format (IF). Additionally, a word-to-concept WFST for spoken language understanding (SLU) was obtained from the same corpus. The acquired scenario WFST and SLU WFST were composed together and then optimized. We evaluated the proposed WFST-based statistic dialog management in terms of correctness to detect the next system actions and have confirmed the automatically acquired dialog scenario from a corpus can manage dialog reasonably on the WFST-based dialog management platform.