ESCA Workshop on Spoken Dialogue Systems Vigsø, Denmark May 30 - June 2, 1995

Automated Appointment Scheduling

Mark Fanty, Stephen Sutton, David G. Novick, Ronald Cole

Center for Spoken Language Understanding, Oregon Graduate Institute of Science and Technology, Portland, OR, USA

We describe a spoken language system that schedules appointments over the telephone. The system has a calendar of available times for some service that callers want to obtain. The system and the caller engage in a cooperative dialogue until a mutually satisfactory appointment time can be found and scheduled. The system has three parts: a speech recognizer based on neural network phoneme classification and word bigrams, a robust phrase-spotting parser, and a dialogue module. The dialogue module has a calendar of available system and user times, a partial history of system goals, and a preference stack to keep track of the focus of the conversation. The dialogue module uses rules to interpret the user's input, make an appropriate response, and provide a prediction (grammar) of the user's next response for the speech recognizer. Rules also determine when the system grabs the initiative from the user.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Fanty, Mark / Sutton, Stephen / Novick, David G. / Cole, Ronald (1995): "Automated appointment scheduling", In SDS-1995, 141-144.