In a flexible, natural-language inquiry system, the dialogue between a caller and the machine can be complex and extensive. Therefore, traditional means for modeling the dialogue flow explicitly would result in very complicated and lengthy descriptions that would not be manageable anymore.
To overcome these difficulties, we have developed a description language specifically for the kind of dialogues that are encountered in automatic inquiry systems. Our idea is to identify those constituents of these dialogues that are common to all of them, independent of the particular application. Then, we represent them in highly separated sections and use an interpreter for controlling the dialogue flow based upon these parts.
This approach, which has been successfully tested in thousands of real-world dialogues, has the additional advantage that only the mere dialogue description must be provided for a new application while the interpreter can remain unchanged.
Cite as: Aust, H., Oerder, M. (1995) Dialogue control in automatic inquiry systems. Proc. ESCA Workshop on Spoken Dialogue Systems, 121-124
@inproceedings{aust95_sds,
author={Harald Aust and Martin Oerder},
title={{Dialogue control in automatic inquiry systems}},
year=1995,
booktitle={Proc. ESCA Workshop on Spoken Dialogue Systems},
pages={121--124}
}