Designing a portable spoken dialogue system

Abstract

Spoken dialogue systems enable the construction of complex applications involving extended, meaningful interactions with users. Building an effective, generic dialogue system requires techniques and expertise from a number of areas such as natural language, computerhuman interaction, and information systems. A key challenge is to design a system through which user-friendly applications can be created in a developer-friendly manner. We present the architecture of Dragon Dialogue, which is a domain and application independent spoken language system. The architecture uses limited knowledge, encapsulated in separate domain, transaction, and dialogue models. These models help customize this architecture to new applications, and facilitate limited but robust natural language techniques for natural prompt generation. We adapt ideas from information systems to handle recovery from errors and commitment in a principled manner. Consequently, our approach marries user-friendliness with developer-friendliness and incorporates sophisticated functionality without increasing the demands on the application developer.

We would like to thank Dr. Paul Bamberg, Professor Munindar Singh, and the anonymous referees for their comments on this paper.