@InProceedings{truong-parthasarathi-pineau:2017:W17-55,
  author    = {Truong, Hoai Phuoc  and  Parthasarathi, Prasanna  and  Pineau, Joelle},
  title     = {MACA: A Modular Architecture for Conversational Agents},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 18th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue},
  month     = {August},
  year      = {2017},
  address   = {Saarbrücken, Germany},
  publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
  pages     = {93--102},
  abstract  = {We propose a software architecture designed to ease the implementation of
	dialogue systems. The Modular Architecture for Conversational Agents (MACA)
	uses a plug-n-play style that allows quick prototyping, thereby facilitating
	the development of new techniques and the reproduction of previous work. The
	architecture separates the domain of the conversation from the agent's dialogue
	strategy, and as such can be easily extended to multiple domains. MACA provides
	tools to host dialogue agents on Amazon Mechanical Turk (mTurk) for data
	collection and allows processing of other sources of training data. The current
	version of the framework already incorporates several domains and existing
	dialogue strategies from the recent literature.},
  url       = {http://aclweb.org/anthology/W17-5513}
}