Hierarchically structured topic manager that organizes dialogs with an AI system

A system that manages a dialog between a user and an AI system using a hierarchically structured tree of topics. An illustrative application is collection of a personal history. A topic manager repeatedly selects a topic and requests the AI system to generate a question based on summary information stored in the associated topic node; this avoids sending the entire dialog to the AI system each time, which would be impossible for long conversations due to AI context window limitations. The AI system analyzes each response from the user to identify new topics to add to the tree, and to update the summary associated with each topic node. Vector embeddings of topic names may be used to place new topic nodes in the most relevant position in the tree. Topics may be selected using a biased tree walk that preferentially selects nodes that have been less explored in previous questions.