Applications closed

ParlAI request for proposals

About

Facebook is pleased to invite university teams to respond to this call for research proposals on chatbots and dialogue systems that make use of Facebook’s ParlAI framework; a total of 7 awards are available.

Building intelligent chatbots is a very topical research challenge and Facebook is keen to accelerate these endeavors — first by creating and sharing relevant tooling and by encouraging research that explores and extends this infrastructure.

ParlAI, released this year, is a unified platform for training and evaluating AI models on a variety of openly available dialog datasets using open-sourced learning agents. Applicants for the grants will be expected to either contribute to the pool of available agents, e.g. by research into new strongly performing models and/or add to the pool of available tasks that are useful for training and evaluating those agents.

Applicants should submit a maximum 2 page proposal detailing what contribution their research is expected to make, and a budget overview of how the proposed funding will be used. Funding will be in the $10,000 to $20,000 range per proposal, depending on the specific requirements. In particular, the funding could be used for data collection using ParlAI’s Mechanical Turk framework.

One person from each funded team is expected to attend a Faculty Summit held in Facebook’s NY office October 2-3, 2017 to present and share their team’s work with both Facebook and other researchers, with travel paid by FB (separate from the award itself).

Successful awardees will be listed on the Facebook Research website and will be encouraged to openly publish any findings/insights from their work.

Timing & Dates

Applications are now closed.

Award Amount: $10,000 to $20,000. Applications should include a budget.

Notification process: Notifications will go out by email to selected applicants.