Lost in Dialogue: A Review and Categorisation of Current Dialogue System Approaches and Technical Solutions

Dialogue systems are an important and very active research area with many practical applications. However, researchers and practitioners new to the field may have difficulty with the categorisation, number and terminology of existing free and commercial systems. Our paper aims to achieve two main objectives. Firstly, based on our structured literature review, we provide a categorisation of dialogue systems according to the objective, modality, domain, architecture, and model, and provide information on the correlations among these categories. Secondly, we summarise and compare frameworks and applications of intelligent virtual assistants, commercial frameworks, research dialogue systems, and large language models according to these categories and provide system recommendations for researchers new to the field.