Overview of the Ninth Dialog System Technology Challenge: DSTC9

This paper introduces the Ninth Dialog System Technology Challenge (DSTC-9). This edition of the DSTC focuses on applying end-to-end dialog technologies for four distinct tasks in dialog systems, namely, 1. Task-oriented dialog Modeling with unstructured knowledge access, 2. Multi-domain task-oriented dialog, 3. Interactive evaluation of dialog, and 4. Situated interactive multi-modal dialog. This paper describes the task definition, provided datasets, baselines and evaluation set-up for each track. We also summarize the results of the submitted systems to highlight the overall trends of the state-of-the-art technologies for the tasks.

Chulaka Gunasekara, Seokhwan Kim, Luis Fernando D'Haro, Abhinav Rastogi, Yun-Nung Chen, Mihail Eric, Behnam Hedayatnia, Karthik Gopalakrishnan, Yang Liu, Chao-Wei Huang, Dilek Hakkani-Tür, Jinchao Li, Qi Zhu, Lingxiao Luo, Lars Liden, Kaili Huang, Shahin Shayandeh, Runze Liang, Baolin Peng, Zheng Zhang, Swadheen Shukla, Minlie Huang, Jianfeng Gao, Shikib Mehri, Yulan Feng, Carla Gordon, Seyed Hossein Alavi, David Traum, Maxine Eskenazi, Ahmad Beirami, Eunjoon (EJ) Cho, Paul A. Crook, Ankita De, Alborz Geramifard, Satwik Kottur, Seungwhan Moon, Shivani Poddar, Rajen Subba · 2020