Talking it Over: The Natural Language Dialog System HAM-ANS

Abstract

This contribution has two objectives. In the first section, the position of language-oriented research in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its relevance to related disciplines are defined and our theoretical approach in the development of HAM-ANS (Hamburg Application-Oriented Natural Language System) is outlined. In the following two sections, this system is presented with an emphasis on aspects which are of theoretical interest. Although details of implementation are largely omitted, it is to be emphasized that all of the processes and knowledge bases described have been fully implemented.

After an introduction to the three dialog situations investigated in our project, the organization of the system as a whole is elucidated on the basis of examples taken from one of the domains of discourse: a hotel reservation situation. The final section is devoted to a special problem of pragmatics: representation and application of user modelling in an AI system. Real, unedited dialogs with HAM-ANS covering all three domains are contained with detailed comments on the internal processing in the appendix.

Work on HAM-ANS was supported by the BMFT under contract number 08IT15038.