Introduction

Building dialogue systems or conversational agents capable of conversing with humans in natural language (NL) and understanding human NL instructions is a long-standing goal of AI (Winograd 1972). This introduction chapter first presents some background knowledge of the modern dialogue systems and discusses their general weaknesses, which provide the motivations for studying and building lifelong learning dialogue systems. It then summarizes the existing research on lifelong learning dialogue systems. Finally, it discusses the organization of the book.