Promoting Portability in Dialogue Management

… Conference on Spoken …, 1998

GALAXY is a client-server architecture for accessing on-line information using spoken dialogue that we introduced at ICSLP-94. It has served as the testbed for developing human language technologies for our group for several years. Recently, we have initiated a significant redesign of the GALAXY architecture to make it easier for many researchers to develop their own applications, using either exclusively their own servers or intermixing them with servers developed by others. This redesign was done in part due to the fact that GALAXY has been designated as the first reference architecture for the new DARPA Communicator Program. The purpose of this paper is to document the changes to GALAXY that led to this first reference architecture, which makes use of a scripting language for flow control to provide flexible interaction among the servers, and a set of libraries to support rapid prototyping of new servers. We describe the new reference architecture in some detail, and report on the current status of its development.

2008

Abstract Our work in this area started as a research project but when L2F joined TecnoVoz, a Portuguese national consortium including Academia and Industry partners, our focus shifted to real-time professional solutions. The integration of our domain-independent Spoken Dialogue System (SDS) framework into commercial products led to a major reengineering process.

Science of Computer Programming, 2005

In this article we describe how Java can be used to implement an object-based, cross-domain, mixed initiative spoken dialogue manager (DM). We describe how dialogue that crosses between several business domains can be modelled as an inheriting and collaborating suite of objects suitable for implementation in Java. We describe the main features of the Java implementation and how the Java dialogue manager can be interfaced via the Galaxy software hub, as used in the DARPAsponsored Communicator projects in the United States, with the various off-the-shelf components that are needed in a complete end-to-end spoken dialogue system. We describe the interplay of the Java components in the course of typical dialogue turns and present an example of the sort of dialogue that the Java DM can support.

… International Conference on …, 2000

This paper describes a dialogue manager and its interaction with semantics and context tracking in a spoken dialogue system developed for general information retrieval and transaction applications. The dialogue system supports the following basic functionality: electronic form filling, database query, result navigation, attribute-value pair referencing, and value and reference resolution. General data structures and algorithms for representing and resolving ambiguity in a spoken dialogue system and a parsimonious parameterization for all application-dependent semantic and dialogue information are proposed. Dialogue management algorithms examine the semantics and dialogue state and adapt to the user's needs and task necessities. These algorithms are applied to a travel reservation application developed under the auspices of the DARPA Communicator project. The proposed algorithms are application-independent and facilitate ease of developing new spoken dialogue systems by changing only the semantics encoded in the prototype tree and the domain-dependent templates used by such components as the parser and the prompt generator.

Proceedings of the 2nd …, 2001

In this paper, we present our approach to dialogue management in the spoken dialogue system that is being developed within the project Interact. Compared to traditional approaches, our dialogue manager will support the system's adaptivity and flexibility with the help of two design ...

2003

This paper presents some of the main features of a prototype spoken dialogue manager (DM) that has been incorporated into the DARPA Communicator architecture. Developed in Java, the object components that constitute the DM separate generic from domain-specific dialogue behaviour in the interests of maintainability and extensibility. Confirmation strategies encapsulated in a high-level DiscourseManager determine the system's behaviour across transactional domains, while rules of thumb encapsulated in a suite of domain experts enable the system to guide the user towards completion of particular transactions. We describe the nature of the generic confirmation strategy and the domain experts' specialised dialogue behaviour. We describe how rules of thumb fire given certain combinations of user-supplied values -or in the light of the system's own interaction with its database.

1993

This paper presents an approach to managing spoken dialogues in information services systems. We describe how the approach, based upon a tri{partite model of interaction , addresses the problems of co{operativeness and portability across languages and task domains. This approach has been implemented in the generic dialogue manager of the Sundial dialogue systems. We outline the capabilities of this dialogue manager and describe our testing methodology.

Proceedings of the HLT-NAACL 2003 workshop on Research directions in dialogue processing -, 2003

We review existing types of dialogue managers (DMs), and propose that the Information State (IS) approach may allow both complexity of dialogue and ease of portability. We discuss implementational drawbacks of the only existing IS DM, and describe our work underway to develop a new DM resolving those drawbacks.

2004

GEMINI (Generic Environment for Multilingual Interactive Natural Interfaces) is an EC funded research project, which has two main objectives: First, the development of a flexible platform able to produce user-friendly interactive multilingual and multi-modal dialogue interfaces to databases with a minimum of human effort, and, second, the demonstration of the platform's efficiency through the development of two different applications based on this platform: EG-Banking, a voice-portal for highquality interactions for bank customers, and CitizenCare, an e-government platform framework for citizen-to-administration interaction which are available for spoken and web-based user interaction.

ANLP/NAACL 2000 Workshop on Conversational systems -, 2000

We describe an architecture for spoken dialogue interfaces to semi-autonomous systems that transforms speech signals through successive representations of linguistic, dialogue, and domain knowledge. Each step produces an output, and a meta-output describing the transformation, with an executable program in a simple scripting language as the final result. The output/meta-output distinction permits perspicuous treatment of diverse tasks such as resolving pronouns, correcting user misconceptions, and optimizing scripts.