NIPS Conversational Intelligence Challenge 2017 Winner System: Skill-based Conversational Agent with Supervised Dialog Manager

We present bot{\#}1337: a dialog system developed for the 1st NIPS Conversational Intelligence Challenge 2017 (ConvAI). The aim of the competition was to implement a bot capable of conversing with humans based on a given passage of text. To enable conversation, we implemented a set of skills for our bot, including chit-chat, topic detection, text summarization, question answering and question generation. The system has been trained in a supervised setting using a dialogue manager to select an appropriate skill for generating a response. The latter allows a developer to focus on the skill implementation rather than the finite state machine based dialog manager. The proposed system bot{\#}1337 won the competition with an average dialogue quality score of 2.78 out of 5 given by human evaluators. Source code and trained models for the bot{\#}1337 are available on GitHub.