Dialogue Systems Engineering: A Survey and Future Directions

TL;DR

This survey paper reviews the field of dialogue systems engineering, highlighting recent advancements, current challenges, and future research directions in building and maintaining effective dialogue systems.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of Dialogue Systems Engineering, maps it to SWEBOK knowledge areas, and identifies unexplored topics and future directions in the field.

Findings

Significant progress due to large language models

Need for tailored software engineering approaches for dialogue systems

Identification of unexplored research areas

Abstract

This paper proposes to refer to the field of software engineering related to the life cycle of dialogue systems as Dialogue Systems Engineering, and surveys this field while also discussing its future directions. With the advancement of large language models, the core technologies underlying dialogue systems have significantly progressed. As a result, dialogue system technology is now expected to be applied to solving various societal issues and in business contexts. To achieve this, it is important to build, operate, and continuously improve dialogue systems correctly and efficiently. Accordingly, in addition to applying existing software engineering knowledge, it is becoming increasingly important to evolve software engineering tailored specifically to dialogue systems. In this paper, we enumerate the knowledge areas of dialogue systems engineering based on those of software engineering, as defined in the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK) Version 4.0, and survey each area. Based on this survey, we identify unexplored topics in each area and discuss the future direction of dialogue systems engineering.