Dialogue system with a supervised dialog manager

We present bot#1337: a dialog system developed for the 1st NIPS Conversational Intelligence Challenge 2017 (ConvAI). The bot is capable of conversing with humans about a given text (e.g., a paragraph from Wikipedia article). The conversation is enabled by a set of skills, including chit-chat, topic detection, text summarization, question answering and question generation. The system has been trained in a supervised setting to select an appropriate skill for generating a response. Our bot is implemented with open-source software and open data; it is self-hosted and employs a supervised dialog manager with a linear hierarchy. The latter allows a developer to focus on skill implementation rather than the finite state machine based dialog manager. Bot#1337 was a winner of the competition with an average dialogue quality score of 2.78 given by human evaluators. Source code and trained models for the bot#1337 are available on GitHub.