Today, human assistants are often replacedby chatbots, designed to communicate via natural language, however, some disadvantages are notorious with this replacement. This PhD thesis project consists of researching, implementing, and testing a solution for guiding the action of a human in a contact center. It will start with the discovery and creation of datasets in Portuguese.Next, it will go through three main components: Extraction for processing dialogs and using the information todescribe interactions; Representation for discovering the most frequent dialog flowsrepresented by graphs; Guidance for helping the agent during a new dialog. These will be integrated in a single framework. In order to avoid service degradation resulting from the adoption of chatbots, this work aims to explore technologies in order to increase the efficiency of the human’s job without losing human contact.

Several dialogue corpora are currently available for research purposes, but they still fall short for the growing interest in the development of dialogue systems with their own specific requirements. In order to help those requiring such a corpus, this paper surveys a range of available options, in terms of aspects like speakers, size, languages, collection, annotations, and domains. Some trends are identified and possible approaches for the creation of new corpora are also discussed.