Managing spoken dialogues for information services

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.

1996

This paper presents a computational model for dialogue management for user-friendly cooperative natural language interaction. The model relies on the assumption that the dialogue can be managed by a dialogue grammar based on speech act information only. F ocus structure can be handled through focal parameters that model information in parameters pertaining to a set of salient domain concepts and related predicates ascribed to this set. The focus parameters are modeled in a dialogue tree. E ciency is achieved by a simple heuristic principle stating that copying relevant information from one segment to the next, updated with information from the application and user initiative, is su cient for most context dependent utterances. Which action to carry out for task related initiatives is determined from information on how these focal parameters are speci ed. The dialogue model was originally developed for written interaction, but is also applicable to spoken interaction, as presented in the paper.

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.

1992

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2003

Introduction: One of the hardest parts of designing and building a conversational system is configuring and coding the dialogue manager. Components such as speech recognition and language understanding have both been modular- ized, with domain-specific information contained in external files and models. SPEECHBUILDER (1) was designed to make these two components even easier to configure, with a Web-based graphical interface to help developers write grammars and create language models for recognizers. However, dialogue management has resisted this push towards portability and modularity, since its role in planning and response generation was considered ultimately too domain-dependent. In the course of building dialogue managers for each of our separate systems (e.g., weather (2), air travel (3), flight status, urban navigation (4), and task delegation (5)), we have noticed that the basic functionality repeats itself across domains. For example, each system must gather information fro...

2004

What would you say if your refrigerator told you, "You're having some friends round for hot chocolate later. Maybe you should order two cartons of milk"? Of course, in Spoken Dialogue Technology, Michael McTear will not give an answer to the question of whether talking to domestic appliances makes sense, but he indicates that even a normal household, for instance, may offer a wide field of application for spokenlanguage dialogue systems in the near future. Consequently his book primarily focuses on theory and practice of these systems. Addressing undergraduate students as well as postgraduate researchers and practitioners in human-computer interfaces, the book is subdivided into three parts which meet the readers' needs: "Background to Spoken Dialogue Technology" (Chapters 1-5), "Developing Spoken Dialogue Applications" (Chapters 6-11), and "Advanced Applications" (Chapters 12-14). Chapter 1, "Talking with Computers: Fact or Fiction," and Chapter 2, "Spoken Dialogue Applications: Research Directions and Commercial Deployment," present recent products and aspects of dialogue technology as well as historical linguistic and artificial intelligence approaches to dialogue and simulated conversation. Aspects of present-day commercial use of spoken dialogue technology are also discussed. In Chapter 3, "Understanding Dialogue," the term dialogue is defined, and four of its key characteristics-dialogue as discourse, dialogue as purposeful activity, dialogue as collaborative activity, and utterances in dialogue-and its structures and processes are described in detail. Chapter 4 gives an overview of the components of a spoken language dialogue system: speech recognition, language understanding, language generation, and text-to-speech synthesis. The central component (i.e., dialogue management) is specified in Chapter 5. Here, dialogue initiative (system initiative, user initiative, and mixed initiative), dialogue control (finite-state-based, frame-based, and agent-based control), and grounding (how to process the user's input) are described. Furthermore, knowledge sources (dialogue history, task record, world knowledge model, domain model, generic model, and user model) and problems that arise when interacting with an external knowledge source are discussed. The second part starts with dialogue engineering, which can be subdivided into analysis and specification of requirements, design, implementation, testing, and evaluation of a dialogue system. The use-case analysis includes user profile (type of user, language, user's experience level, etc.) and usage profile (frequency of use, input/output device type, environment, etc.). The spoken-language requirements can

5th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology (Eurospeech 1997)

This is a repository copy of A generic template for the evaluation of dialogue management systems.

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.

Natural Language Engineering, 1997

Natural language interfaces require dialogue models that allow for robust, habitable and efficient interaction. This paper presents such a model for dialogue management for natural language interfaces. The model is based on empirical studies of human computer interaction in various simple service applications. It is shown that for applications belonging to this class the dialogue can be handled using fairly simple means. The interaction can be modeled in a dialogue grammar with information on the functional role of an utterance as conveyed in the linguistic structure. Focusing is handled using dialogue objects recorded in a dialogue tree representing the constituents of the dialogue. The dialogue objects in the dialogue tree can be accessed by the various modules for interpretation, generation and background system access. Focused entities are modeled in entities pertaining to objects or sets of objects, and related domain concept information; properties of the domain objects. A sim...

2004

Spoken dialogue systems allow users to interact with computer-based applications such as databases and expert systems by using natural spoken language. The origins of spoken dialogue systems can be traced back to Artificial Intelligence research in the 1950s concerned with developing conversational interfaces. However, it is only within the last decade or so, with major advances in speech technology, that large-scale working systems have been developed and, in some cases, introduced into commercial environments. As a result many major telecommunications and software companies have become aware of the potential for spoken dialogue technology to provide solutions in newly developing areas such as computer-telephony integration. Voice portals, which provide a speech-based interface between a telephone user and Web-based services, are the most recent application of spoken dialogue technology. This article describes the main components of the technology-speech recognition, language understanding, dialogue management, communication with an external source such as a database, language generation, speech synthesis-and shows how these component technologies can be integrated into a spoken dialogue system. The article describes in detail the methods that have been adopted in some well-known dialogue systems, explores different system architectures, considers issues of specification, design, and evaluation, reviews some currently available dialogue development toolkits, and outlines prospects for future development.