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A popular approach to dialogue management is based on a finitestate model, where user utterances trigger transitions between the dialogue states, and these states, in turn, determine the system's response. This paper describes an alternative dialogue planning algorithm based on the notion of filling in an electronic form, or "Eform." Each slot has associated prompts that guide the user through the dialogue, and a priority that determines the order in which the system tries to acquire information. These slots can be optional or mandatory. However, the user is not restricted to follow the system's lead, and is free to ignore the prompts and take the initiative in the dialogue. The E-form-based dialogue planner has been used in an application to search a database of used car advertisements. The goal is to assist the user in selecting, from this database, a small list of cars which match their constraints. For a large number of dialogues collected from over 600 naive users, we found over 70% compliance in answering specific system prompts.

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This paper represents a status report on the MIT ATIS system. The most significant new achievement is that we now have a speech-input mode. It is based on the MIT SUMMIT system using context independent phone models, and includes a word-pair grammar with perplexity 92 (on the June-90 test set). In addition, we have completely redesigned the back-end component, in order to emphasize portability and extensibility. The parser now produces an intermediate semantic frame representation, which serves as the focal point for all back-end operations, such as history management, text generation, and SQL query generation. Most of those aspects of the system that are tied to a particular domain are now entered through a set of tables associated with a small artificial language for decoding them. We have also improved the display of the database table, making it considerably easier for a subject to comprehend the information given. We report here on the results of the official DARPA February-91 evaluation, as well as on results of an evaluation on data collected at MIT, for both speech input and text input.