Approaches for Dialog Management in Conversational Agents

Dialog agents, like digital assistants and automated chat interfaces (e.g., chatbots), are becoming more and more popular as users adapt to conversing with their devices as they do with humans. In this paper, we present approaches and available tools for dialog management (DM), a component of dialog agents that handles dialog context and decides the next action for the agent to take. In this paper, we establish an overview of the field of DM, compare approaches and state-of-the-art tools in industry and research work on a set of dimensions, and identify directions for further research work.