Dialogue Management

Abstract

The Dialogue Manager is the central component of a dialogue system. The Dialogue Manager accepts spoken input from the user, produces messages to be communicated to the user, interacts with external knowledge sources, and generally controls the dialogue flow. There are various ways in which these dialogue management functions can be performed, depending to some extent on the type of task that is involved. At one end of the scale the task may involve a fairly simple interaction in which users retrieve information and perform routine transactions. At the other end of the scale are complex tasks involving negotiation and problem solving, which require a more advanced type of interaction.