Conversational systems have improved dramatically recently and are gaining adoption in industries such as e-commerce, banking, finance and real estate to name a few. Although there is a lot of research done in developing conversational systems spanning areas such as dialogue systems, NLP, NLU, HCI, search and recommender systems; there are additional challenges when a product is created based on conversational systems and deployed to real world users. Research from different areas come together when conversational systems are put in practice along with unique and additional challenges. The KDD 2020 Workshop on Conversational Systems Towards Mainstream Adoption (KDD Converse 2020) brought together researchers and practitioners to discuss issues, learnings, challenges and research in productization of the conversational systems and their deployment in the real world. The workshop drew contributions from both industry as well as academia. We received twelve submissions, and accepted eight papers. The submissions were reviewed by an international program committee of high repute experts in the field both from industry and academic institutions. Each submission was reviewed by at least three reviewers. We would like to thank everyone who submitted a paper to the workshop. In addition to presentation of a subset of accepted submissions, the workshop had three keynotes by invited speakers from both industry and academia, and three contributed talks from the authors of the selected papers. We would like to thank the members of the program committee for providing high quality reviews and for taking into consideration the goals of this workshop. We would like to thank KDD for hosting us. We extend our sincere gratitude to all the authors, presenters, and invited speakers for their contributions in making the first edition of this workshop successful.
PROGRAM COMMITTEE ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●