# Recent Advances in Deep Learning Based Dialogue Systems: A Systematic Survey

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.04387 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04387/

## Key facts

- Cited by 130 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 290 of its 478 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 May 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 290)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning for Fast Adaptation of Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.03400/) (2017)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.1078/) (2014)
- [Empirical Evaluation of Gated Recurrent Neural Networks on Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.3555/) (2014)
- [Visualizing and Understanding Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2901/) (2013)
- [Deep contextualized word representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05365/) (2018)
- [Asynchronous Methods for Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.01783/) (2016)
- [ViLBERT: Pretraining Task-Agnostic Visiolinguistic Representations for Vision-and-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02265/) (2019)
- [Transformer-XL: Attentive Language Models Beyond a Fixed-Length Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.02860/) (2019)
- [Big Bird: Transformers for Longer Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.14062/) (2020)
- [Know What You Don't Know: Unanswerable Questions for SQuAD](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03822/) (2018)
- [LXMERT: Learning Cross-Modality Encoder Representations from Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07490/) (2019)
- [On the Properties of Neural Machine Translation: Encoder-Decoder Approaches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1259/) (2014)
- [VisualBERT: A Simple and Performant Baseline for Vision and Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03557/) (2019)
- [Oscar: Object-Semantics Aligned Pre-training for Vision-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06165/) (2020)
- [A Diversity-Promoting Objective Function for Neural Conversation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.03055/) (2015)
- [Pointer Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.03134/) (2015)
- [Personalizing Dialogue Agents: I have a dog, do you have pets too?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07243/) (2018)
- [Efficient Transformers: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.06732/) (2020)
- [Dueling Network Architectures for Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06581/) (2015)
- [MultiWOZ -- A Large-Scale Multi-Domain Wizard-of-Oz Dataset for Task-Oriented Dialogue Modelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.00278/) (2018)
- [CTRL: A Conditional Transformer Language Model for Controllable Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05858/) (2019)
- [VideoBERT: A Joint Model for Video and Language Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01766/) (2019)
- [DailyDialog: A Manually Labelled Multi-turn Dialogue Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.03957/) (2017)
- [MELD: A Multimodal Multi-Party Dataset for Emotion Recognition in Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.02508/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 130)

- [Jailbreaking ChatGPT via Prompt Engineering: An Empirical Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13860/) (2023)
- [A Comprehensive Survey of AI-Generated Content (AIGC): A History of Generative AI from GAN to ChatGPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04226/) (2023)
- [ChatGPT: Jack of all trades, master of none](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.10724/) (2023)
- [BlenderBot 3: a deployed conversational agent that continually learns to responsibly engage](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.03188/) (2022)
- [A Survey on Recent Advances in LLM-Based Multi-turn Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18013/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Large Language Models for Healthcare: from Data, Technology, and Applications to Accountability and Ethics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05694/) (2023)
- [Sequence Parallelism: Long Sequence Training from System Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.13120/) (2021)
- [Generative Spoken Dialogue Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16502/) (2022)
- [Don't Trust ChatGPT when Your Question is not in English: A Study of Multilingual Abilities and Types of LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16339/) (2023)
- [A Complete Survey on Generative AI (AIGC): Is ChatGPT from GPT-4 to GPT-5 All You Need?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11717/) (2023)
- [META-GUI: Towards Multi-modal Conversational Agents on Mobile GUI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11029/) (2022)
- [SeqDiffuSeq: Text Diffusion with Encoder-Decoder Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10325/) (2022)
- [Evaluating LLM-based Agents for Multi-Turn Conversations: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22458/) (2025)
- [Rethinking Explainability as a Dialogue: A Practitioner's Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.01875/) (2022)
- [RHO (ρ): Reducing Hallucination in Open-domain Dialogues with Knowledge Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.01588/) (2022)
- [SMILE: Single-turn to Multi-turn Inclusive Language Expansion via ChatGPT for Mental Health Support](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.00450/) (2023)
- [D4: a Chinese Dialogue Dataset for Depression-Diagnosis-Oriented Chat](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11764/) (2022)
- [GL-GIN: Fast and Accurate Non-Autoregressive Model for Joint Multiple Intent Detection and Slot Filling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01925/) (2021)
- [Metaphors in Pre-Trained Language Models: Probing and Generalization Across Datasets and Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14139/) (2022)
- [A Survey of Table Reasoning with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.08259/) (2024)
- [Fusing task-oriented and open-domain dialogues in conversational agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04137/) (2021)
- [DiaASQ : A Benchmark of Conversational Aspect-based Sentiment Quadruple Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05705/) (2022)
- [Enhancing Personalized Dialogue Generation with Contrastive Latent Variables: Combining Sparse and Dense Persona](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11482/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Recent Advances in Conversational Data Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.13003/) (2024)
- [Open-world Story Generation with Structured Knowledge Enhancement: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04634/) (2022)
- [An Overview on Language Models: Recent Developments and Outlook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05759/) (2023)
- [Adaptive Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Conversational Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21712/) (2024)
- [LexRAG: Benchmarking Retrieval-Augmented Generation in Multi-Turn Legal Consultation Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20640/) (2025)
- [TaSL: Continual Dialog State Tracking via Task Skill Localization and Consolidation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.09857/) (2024)
- [End-to-end Task-oriented Dialogue: A Survey of Tasks, Methods, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09008/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Dialogue systems are a popular natural language processing (NLP) task as it is promising in real-life applications. It is also a complicated task since many NLP tasks deserving study are involved. As a result, a multitude of novel works on this task are carried out, and most of them are deep learning based due to the outstanding performance. In this survey, we mainly focus on the deep learning based dialogue systems. We comprehensively review state-of-the-art research outcomes in dialogue systems and analyze them from two angles: model type and system type. Specifically, from the angle of model type, we discuss the principles, characteristics, and applications of different models that are widely used in dialogue systems. This will help researchers acquaint these models and see how they are applied in state-of-the-art frameworks, which is rather helpful when designing a new dialogue system. From the angle of system type, we discuss task-oriented and open-domain dialogue systems as two streams of research, providing insight into the hot topics related. Furthermore, we comprehensively review the evaluation methods and datasets for dialogue systems to pave the way for future research. Finally, some possible research trends are identified based on the recent research outcomes. To the best of our knowledge, this survey is the most comprehensive and up-to-date one at present for deep learning based dialogue systems, extensively covering the popular techniques. We speculate that this work is a good starting point for academics who are new to the dialogue systems or those who want to quickly grasp up-to-date techniques in this area.