Deep learning in conversational language understanding

Recent advancements in AI resulted in increased availability of conversational assistants that can help with tasks such as seeking times to schedule an event and creating a calendar entry at that time, finding a restaurant and booking a table there at a certain time. However, creating automated agents with human-level intelligence still remains one of the most challenging problems of AI. One key component of such systems is conversational language understanding, which is a holy grail area of research for decades, as it is not a clearly defined task but relies heavily on the AI application it is used for. Nevertheless, this chapter attempts to compile the recent deep learning based literature on such goal-oriented conversational language understanding studies, starting with a historical perspective, pre-deep learning era work, moving toward most recent advances in this field.