Conversational Machine Comprehension: a Literature Review

Understand

Conversational Machine Comprehension (CMC), a research track in conversational AI, expects the machine to understand an open-domain natural language text and thereafter engage in a multi-turn conversation to answer questions related to the text.

• While most of the research in Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) revolves around single-turn question answering (QA), multi-turn CMC has recently gained prominence, thanks to the advancement in natural language understanding via neural language models such as BERT and the introduction of large-scale conversational datasets such as CoQA and QuAC.
• The rise in interest has, however, led to a flurry of concurrent publications, each with a different yet structurally similar modeling approach and an inconsistent view of the surrounding literature.
• With the volume of model submissions to conversational datasets increasing every year, there exists a need to consolidate the scattered knowledge in this domain to streamline future research.