Rapid development of spoken language dialog applications requires a domain-portable dialog framework and the ability to re-use dialogs which have already been created. Satisfying this goal should not come at the expense of dialog flexibility and naturalness. Current frameworks which enable dialog re-use typically do so by linking dialogs sequentially in a finite-state graph, producing a rigid dialog flow. This paper describes a framework for specifying dialogs that both enables re-use and maintains flexibility and naturalness. This is accomplished through nesting frame descriptions. The structure of a dialog is compositionally determined both by its own top-level frame description and by the frame description of the dialogs which are nested within it.
Cite as: Thompson, W., Bliss, H. (2000) A declarative framework for building compositional dialog modules. Proc. 6th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP 2000), vol. 2, 640-643
@inproceedings{thompson00_icslp,
author={William Thompson and Harry Bliss},
title={{A declarative framework for building compositional dialog modules}},
year=2000,
booktitle={Proc. 6th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP 2000)},
pages={vol. 2, 640-643}
}