Alexa Prize Socialbot Grand Challenge: Yet another year of progression in conversational AI

Building conversational systems that enable natural language interactions with machines has been an attractive research area since the early days of computing, as exemplified by earlier text-based systems such as ELIZA [Weizenbaum, 1966]. The research and development work in this area has been increasing since then, with many publications on both task-oriented [Hosseini-Asl et al, 2020; Papangelis et al, 2020; Vlasov et al, 2019; Zhang et al, 2019, among others] and open-domain [Adiwardana et al, 2020; Roller et al, 2020; Yavuz et al, 2019; among others] dialogue applications. Recent advances in deep learning, and especially Transformer based language models also enabled building large chatbot models, using conversational data mined from the web.