Towards a PURE spoken dialogue system for information access

Abstract

With the rapid explosion of the World Wide Web, it is becoming increasingly possible to easily acquire a wide variety of information such as flight schedules, yellow pages, used car prices, current stock prices, entertainment event schedules, account balances, etc. It would be very useful to have spoken dialogue interfaces for such information access tasks. We identify portability, usability, robustness, and extensibility as the four primary design objectives for such systems. In other words, the objective is to develop a PURE (Portable, Usable, Robust, Extensible) system.A two-layered dialogue architecture for spoken dialogue systems is presented where the upper layer is domainindependent and the lower layer is domainspecific. We are implementing this architecture in a mixed-initiative system that accesses flight arrival/departure information from the World Wide Web.

Conversation Graph: Data Augmentation, Training, and Evaluation for Non-Deterministic Dialogue Management

“…The idea of using graphs in dialogue systems is not new (Larsen and Baekgaard, 1994;Schlungbaum and Elwert, 1996;Agarwal, 1997), but it is limited to graphs representing flow charts where each node is an action step in a sequence, without a specific semantic importance assigned to the nodes themselves (Aust and Oerder, 1995;Wärnestål, 2005). On the other hand, the ConvGraph dialogue state information is encoded in a structured way for each node, allowing the unification of nodes across conversations.…”