This paper introduces the Ubuntu Dialogue Corpus, a dataset containing almost 1 million multi-turn dialogues, with a total of over 7 million utterances and 100 million words. This provides a unique resource for research into building dialogue managers based on neural language models that can make use of large amounts of unlabeled data. The dataset has both the multi-turn property of conversations in the Dialog State Tracking Challenge datasets, and the unstructured nature of interactions from microblog services such as Twitter. We also describe two neural learning architectures suitable for analyzing this dataset, and provide benchmark performance on the task of selecting the best next response.

We investigate evaluation metrics for dialogue response generation systems where supervised labels, such as task completion, are not available. Recent works in response generation have adopted metrics from machine translation to compare a model's generated response to a single target response. We show that these metrics correlate very weakly with human judgements in the non-technical Twitter domain, and not at all in the technical Ubuntu domain. We provide quantitative and qualitative results highlighting specific weaknesses in existing metrics, and provide recommendations for future development of better automatic evaluation metrics for dialogue systems.

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Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) provide a rich framework for sequential decision-making under uncertainty in stochastic domains. However, solving a POMDP is often intractable except for small problems due to their complexity. Here, we focus on online approaches that alleviate the computational complexity by computing good local policies at each decision step during the execution. Online algorithms generally consist of a lookahead search to find the best action to execute at each time step in an environment. Our objectives here are to survey the various existing online POMDP methods, analyze their properties and discuss their advantages and disadvantages; and to thoroughly evaluate these online approaches in different environments under various metrics (return, error bound reduction, lower bound improvement). Our experimental results indicate that state-of-the-art online heuristic search methods can handle large POMDP domains efficiently

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