  This paper presents HRIChat, a framework for developing closed-domain chat
dialogue systems. Being able to engage in chat dialogues has been found
effective for improving communication between humans and dialogue systems. This
paper focuses on closed-domain systems because they would be useful when
combined with task-oriented dialogue systems in the same domain. HRIChat
enables domain-dependent language understanding so that it can deal well with
domain-specific utterances. In addition, HRIChat makes it possible to integrate
state transition network-based dialogue management and reaction-based dialogue
management. FoodChatbot, which is an application in the food and restaurant
domain, has been developed and evaluated through a user study. Its results
suggest that reasonably good systems can be developed with HRIChat. This paper
also reports lessons learned from the development and evaluation of
FoodChatbot.
