  This paper describes the Tartan conversational agent built for the 2018 Alexa
Prize Competition. Tartan is a non-goal-oriented socialbot focused around
providing users with an engaging and fluent casual conversation. Tartan's key
features include an emphasis on structured conversation based on flexible
finite-state models and an approach focused on understanding and using
conversational acts. To provide engaging conversations, Tartan blends
script-like yet dynamic responses with data-based generative and retrieval
models. Unique to Tartan is that our dialog manager is modeled as a dynamic
Finite State Machine. To our knowledge, no other conversational agent
implementation has followed this specific structure.
