Chatbots and Conversation As A Platform (CAAP)

At Microsoft Build 2016 event, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that chatbots, as next big thing, will have “as profound an impact as previous shifts we’ve had.” The past paradigm shifts include graphical user interface, the web browser and the touchscreen. Conversations As A platform(CAAP) has the promise of making booking a flight or buying a new shirt as easy as sending a text message, with the potential to make computing more accessible to users on mobile devices.

This group has been worked on the social chat, information & answer and dialogue system which are three key layers of technology to build the pyramid of CAAP. Our work includes research on query understanding, response or answer generation, context-aware ranker, knowledge-based response and answer, text-based response and answer, webpage-based response and answer. Personalization of the response and answer is also important research topic. In last two years, this group has worked with MS product teams on various chatbots such as Xiaoice (in China), Rinna (Japan) and Tay (in US).