Paper ID: 2312.03342

Topic and genre in dialogue

Amandine Decker, Ellen Breitholtz, Christine Howes, Staffan Larsson

In this paper we argue that topic plays a fundamental role in conversations, and that the concept is needed in addition to that of genre to define interactions. In particular, the concepts of genre and topic need to be separated and orthogonally defined. This would enable modular, reliable and controllable flexible-domain dialogue systems.

Submitted: Dec 6, 2023