Building dialogue systems and intelligent chatbots are very topical research challenges and Facebook is trying to accelerate these endeavors — first by creating and sharing relevant tooling and by sponsoring research that explores and extends this infrastructure.  We are pleased to announce the following ParlAI research award winners and their topic areas.

A Task for Developing Context-Dependent Understanding of Language
Christopher Manning, Siva Reddy, Drew Arad, Stanford, University

Conversational Question Generation
Pooja Sethi,Maxwell Forbes, Ari Holtzman, Yejin Choi, University of Washington

GUIDE DialOGS: Engaging intelligent agents in task-specific vision-based dialog to assist the visually-impaired
Daniela Massiceti, Nantas Nardelli Siddharth Narayanaswamy Philip H.S. Torr, University of Oxford

Multi-model dialog generation with Off Policy Q-learning
Koustav Sinha, Nicolas Angleard-Gontier, Prasanna Parthasarathi, Michael Noseworthy, Peter Henderson, Joelle Pineau, McGill University

Personality-based Stylistic Dialogue Response Generation
Mohit Bansal, Tong Niu, Lisa Bauer, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Treasure Hunt: Natural Language Navigation in Diverse Indoor Spaces
Peter Anderson,Qi Wu, Damien Teney, Niko Sunderhauf, Stephen Gould, Anton van den Hengel, Australian National University

Visual Reasoning with Natural Language in ParlAI
Yoav Artzi, Alane Sur, Cornell University

Towards Explainable Multi-Supporting-Fact Question Answering in the Wild
Peng Qi, Zhilin Yang, Saizheng Zhang, Yoshua Bengio,William W. Cohen, Christopher D. Manning, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Stanford University

Partner- Specificity in Visually-Grounded Task-Oriented Dialogue
Raquel Fernandez, University of Amsterdam