PROGRAM DIALOG BY EXAMPLE

One embodiment provides a method including receiving authoring conversational training data. A machine learning based conversational agent is trained with the conversational training data. The training includes: creating and storing example transcripts of user utterances, creating and storing example transcripts of agent utterances, sequencing utterance transcripts using the example transcripts of user utterances and the example transcripts of agent utterances, forming a corpus from the sequenced utterance transcripts, marking speech patterns that represent social actions from tagging the sequenced utterance transcripts, and forming a patterned corpus from the marked speech patterns.