Best overviews: Chen et al 2017 - A Survey on Dialogue Systems: Recent Advances and New Frontiers and Roller et al 2020 - Recipes for building an open-domain chatbot.
See also Chatbots.
For a nice overview, see related work section of Joshi 2024.
A dialog act, also known as a speech act, is the “action” an utterance performs, such as request information, confirm, etc.
Dialog Acts are related to RST, except that dialog acts assume that the relation expressed in the dialog act is between adjacent utterances. See here for more information.
Predicting the next dialog act. Papers:
See also Learning from Feedback.
See also NLP progress - Dialog and Serban et al 2017 - A Survey of Available Corpora for Building Data-Driven Dialogue Systems.
Safety: making sure the dialog agent doesn't use swear words, offensive language, give bad advice, etc, which could happen if the agent has been trained on a corpus of dialogs.
See also Chatbots - Evaluation.