  We propose a software architecture designed to ease the implementation of
dialogue systems. The Modular Architecture for Conversational Agents (MACA)
uses a plug-n-play style that allows quick prototyping, thereby facilitating
the development of new techniques and the reproduction of previous work. The
architecture separates the domain of the conversation from the agent's dialogue
strategy, and as such can be easily extended to multiple domains. MACA provides
tools to host dialogue agents on Amazon Mechanical Turk (mTurk) for data
collection and allows processing of other sources of training data. The current
version of the framework already incorporates several domains and existing
dialogue strategies from the recent literature.
