Natural language dialogue service for appointment scheduling agents

Abstract

Appointment scheduling is a problem faced daily by many individuals and organizations. Cooperating agent systems have been developed to partially automate this task. In order to extend the circle of participants as far as possible we advocate the use of natural language transmitted by email. We describe Cosma, a fully implemented German language server for existing appointment scheduling agent systems. Cosma can cope with multiple dialogues in parallel, and accounts for differences in dialogue behaviour between human and machine agents. NL coverage of the sublanguage is achieved through both corpusbased grammar development and the use of message extraction techniques.

Modeling Negotiation Dialogs

“…Appointment scheduling, in particular, typically involves a sequence of proposals and rejections, or a successive "zooming in" on some particular date. Representing and reasoning with temporal expressions has been addressed in earlier research, for instance in the COSMA system Busemann et al (1997), but not for the purposes of translation. Within Verbmobil, the context evaluation module (see chapter ??)…”

Overview of Current Research

“…PNT Pointing, including menus, tables, buttons, maps, drag-n-drop VIR 3D, virtual reality MUL Support for multiple participants System, name and reference (Lie et al, 1998) theatre booking x x x x Dialogos: (Albesano et al, 1997) railway enquiry x x x TRAINS93: (Sikorski and Allen, 1996), (Stent and Allen, 1997) route planning x x x ARTIMIS: ) telephone enquiry x x x PADIS: (Bouwman, 1998) telephone enquiry x x x COSMA: (Busemann et al, 1997) appointment scheduling x x x CASSY: (Gerlach and Onken, 1993) pilot assistance x x x WOMBAT: (Blandford, 1995) purchase planning x x CARTOON: (Martin, 1997) map enquiry x x x InterLACE: (Trafton et al, 1997) map enquiry x x x ORIMUHS 1 (Encarnacão, 1997) intelligent help x x x x QuickSet (Johnston et al, 1997) war tactics x x x x x Circuit fix-it shop (Smith and Hipp, 1994) circuit repair x x x Schisma ( , more specific information about the parser can be found in (Lie et al, 1998) ) is a theatre inquiry and booking system. Its language parser is based on 'rewrite-and-understand', which means any language utterance is rewritten, using production rules, into a 'canonical' form.…”

Automating NL appointment scheduling with COSMA

“…We demonstrate extended versions of the systems described in (Busemann et al, 1997). In particular, the systems to be demonstrated can process counterproposals, which form an important part of efficient and cooperative scheduling dialogues.…”

“…NL analysis in the server is based on a shallow parsing strategy implemented in the SMES system (Neumann et al, 1997). The use of SMES in COSMA, semantic analysis and inference, the dialogue model mapping between human and machine dialogue structures, utterance generation, the architectural framework of the server, and the PASHA agent system are described in (Busemann et al, 1997). Both papers can be found in the ANLP '97 conference proceedings.…”

“…The server interface is command-driven. A client may connect to the server and open up a dialogue (see Figure 1 in (Busemann et al, 1997)). During the dialogue, the client may request texts to be analyzed or semantic descriptions to be verbalized.…”