Let's talk topically with artificial agents! Providing agents with humanlike topic awareness in everyday dialog situations

Spoken interactions between humans are characterized by coherent sequences of utterances assigning a thematical structure to the whole conversation. Such coherence and the success of a meaningful and flexible dialog are based on the cognitive ability to be aware of the ongoing conversational topic. This paper presents how to enable such topically coherent conversations between humans and interactive systems by emulating humanlike topic awareness in artificial agents. Therefore, we firstly automated human topic awareness on the basis of preprocessed Wikipedia knowledge and secondly transferred such computer-based awareness to a virtual agent. As a result, we contribute to improve human-agent dialogs by enabling topical talk between human and artificial conversation partners.