The queen's communicator: an object-oriented dialogue manager

Proceeding of Fourth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing. ICSLP '96, 1996

A popular approach to dialogue management is based on a finitestate model, where user utterances trigger transitions between the dialogue states, and these states, in turn, determine the system's response. This paper describes an alternative dialogue planning algorithm based on the notion of filling in an electronic form, or "Eform." Each slot has associated prompts that guide the user through the dialogue, and a priority that determines the order in which the system tries to acquire information. These slots can be optional or mandatory. However, the user is not restricted to follow the system's lead, and is free to ignore the prompts and take the initiative in the dialogue. The E-form-based dialogue planner has been used in an application to search a database of used car advertisements. The goal is to assist the user in selecting, from this database, a small list of cars which match their constraints. For a large number of dialogues collected from over 600 naive users, we found over 70% compliance in answering specific system prompts.

2013

We present Dialog Moves Markup Language (DMML): an extensible markup language (XML) representation of modality independent communicative acts of automated conversational agents. In our architecture, DMML is the interface to and from conversational dialog managers for user interactions through any channel or modality. The use of a common XML interface language across different channels promotes high cost efficiency for the business. DMML itself has no application or domain specific elements; DMML elements embed elements representing application business logic. DMML captures the abstractions necessary to represent arbitrary multi-agent dialogs and to build cost-efficient, sophisticated natural language dialog systems for business applications. PDA

Interactive Spoken Dialog Systems on Bringing Speech and NLP Together in Real Applications - ISDS '97, 1997

Our approach to speech-based dialogue modelling aims to exploit, in the context of an object-oriented architecture, dialogue processing abilities that are common to many application domains. The coded objects that comprise the system contribute both recognition rules and processing rules (heuristics). A Domain Spotter supports the ability to move between domains and between individual skillsets. A Dialogue Model records individual concepts as they occur; notes the extent to which concepts have been confirmed; populates request templates; and fulfils a remembering and reminding role as the system attempts to gather coherent information from an imperfect speech recognition component. Our work will aim to confirm the extent to which the potential strengths of an object-oriented-paradigm (system extensibility, component reuse, etc.) can be realised in a natural language dialogue system, and the extent to which a functionally rich suite of collaborating and inheriting objects can support purposeful humancomputer conversations that are adaptable in structure, and wide ranging in subject matter and skillsets.

Proceedings of the 37th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics on Computational Linguistics -, 1999

1995

This paper presents an action scheme for dia logue management for natural language inler faces The scheme guides a dialogue manager which directs the interface's dialogue with the user communicates with the background system, and assists the interpretation and gets eration modules The dialogue manager was designed on the basis of an investigation of empirical material collected in Wizard of Oz experiments The empirical investigations re vealed that in dialogues with database systems users specify an object, or a set of objects and ask for domain concept information, e g the value of a property of that object or set of ob|ects The interface responds 1 perform ing the appropriate action e g providing the requited information or initiating a clarified lion subdialogue The action to bt carried out by the interface can be determined based on how objects and properties are specified from information in the user utterance the dialogue context and the response from the background system and its domain model J0NSSON

1993

This paper describes a method for the development of dialogue managers for natural language interfaces. A dialogue manager is presented designed on the basis of both a theoretical investigation of models for dialogue management and an analysis of empirical material. It is argued that for natural language interfaces many of the human interaction phenomena accounted for in, for instance, plan-based models of dialogue do not occur. Instead, for many applications, dialogue in natural language interfaces can be managed from information on the functional role of an utterance as conveyed in the linguistic structure. This is modelled in a dialogue grammar which controls the interaction. Focus structure is handled using dialogue objects recorded in a dialogue tree which can be accessed through a scoreboard by the various modules for interpretation, generation and background system access. A sublanguage approach is proposed. For each new application the Dialogue Manager is customized to meet the needs of the application. This requires empirical data which are collected through Wizard of Oz simulations. The corpus is used when updating the different knowledge sources involved in the natural language interface. In this paper the customization of the Dialogue Manager for database information retrieval applications is also described.

Proceedings of the 20th …, 2004

A dialogue manager provides the decision making at the heart of a spoken dialogue system. In an object-oriented approach to dialogue management, generic behaviour, such as confirming new or modified information that has been supplied by the ...

Ninth European Conference …, 2005

This paper presents an examination of the Queen's Communicator, a cross-domain, mixed initiative spoken dialogue system, in terms of the system's extensibility and reusability. The paper explores how an object-oriented design methodology can be used to define both ...

2002

We have recently begun an effort to develop a domain-independent dialogue manager that can be used as part of a mixed-initiative spo- ken dialogue system to construct more complex systems without modifying underlying code. Inside a generic dialogue manager, the developer would select from a suite of self-contained dialogue flow functions, and tailor them in accordance with the specifics of the application. We have also developed grammars catered to semantic concepts such as dates/times, and prices, along with a server that interprets and canonicalizes these concepts. These grammars can be used by developers in the SPEECHBUILDER frame- work (1) to obtain precompiled meaning representations for com- monly used concepts, and embed them into their applications, dras- tically reducing the work required to configure a conversational system. The generic dialogue manager and functions supporting common semantic concepts have been applied to several new do- mains including a Hotel Informatio...

1997