Sixth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing
(ICSLP 2000)

Beijing, China
October 16-20, 2000

Dialogue Management in the Bell Labs Communicator System

Alexandros Potamianos, Egbert Ammicht, Hong-Kwang J. Kuo

Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, Murray Hill, NJ, USA

This paper describes a dialogue manager and its interaction with semantics and context tracking in a spoken dialogue system developed for general information retrieval and transaction applications. The dialogue system supports the following basic functionality: electronic form filling, database query, result navigation, attribute-value pair referencing, and value and reference resolution. General data structures and algorithms for representing and resolving ambiguity in a spoken dialogue system and a parsimonious parameterization for all application-dependent semantic and dialogue information are proposed. Dialogue management algorithms examine the semantics and dialogue state and adapt to the user’s needs and task necessities. These algorithms are applied to a travel reservation application developed under the auspices of the DARPA Communicator project. The proposed algorithms are application-independent and facilitate ease of developing new spoken dialogue systems by changing only the semantics encoded in the prototype tree and the domain-dependent templates used by such components as the parser and the prompt generator.


Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Potamianos, Alexandros / Ammicht, Egbert / Kuo, Hong-Kwang J. (2000): "Dialogue management in the Bell Labs communicator system", In ICSLP-2000, vol.2, 603-606.