  We are witnessing a confluence of vision, speech and dialog system
technologies that are enabling the IVAs to learn audio-visual groundings of
utterances and have conversations with users about the objects, activities and
events surrounding them. Recent progress in visual grounding techniques and
Audio Understanding are enabling machines to understand shared semantic
concepts and listen to the various sensory events in the environment. With
audio and visual grounding methods, end-to-end multimodal SDS are trained to
meaningfully communicate with us in natural language about the real dynamic
audio-visual sensory world around us. In this work, we explore the role of
`topics' as the context of the conversation along with multimodal attention
into such an end-to-end audio-visual scene-aware dialog system architecture. We
also incorporate an end-to-end audio classification ConvNet, AclNet, into our
models. We develop and test our approaches on the Audio Visual Scene-Aware
Dialog (AVSD) dataset released as a part of the DSTC7. We present the analysis
of our experiments and show that some of our model variations outperform the
baseline system released for AVSD.
