Linkping University Electronic Press

Title:	Language-Processing Strategies and Mixed-Initiative Dialogues
Authors:	Johan Boye, Mats Wirén, Manny Rayner, Ian Lewin, David Carter, and Ralph Becket
Series:	Linkping Electronic Articles in Computer and Information Science ISSN 1401-9841
Issue:	Vol. 4 (1999), No. 024
URL:	http://www.ep.liu.se/ea/cis/1999/024/

Abstract:	We describe an implemented spoken-language dialogue system for a travel-planning domain, which accesses a commercially available travel-information web-server and supports a flexible mixed-initiative dialogue strategy. We argue, based on data from initial Wizard-of-Oz experiments, that mixed-initiative strategies are appropriate for many types of user, but require more sophisticated architectures for processing of language and dialogue; we then use these observations to motivate an architecture which combines parallel deep and shallow natural language analysis engines and an agenda-driven dialogue manager. We outline the top-level processing strategy used by the dialogue manager, and also a novel formalism, which we call Flat Utterance Description, that allows us to reduce the output of the deep and shallow language-processing engines to a common representation.

Abstract:

We describe an implemented spoken-language dialogue system for a travel-planning domain, which accesses a commercially available travel-information web-server and supports a flexible mixed-initiative dialogue strategy. We argue, based on data from initial Wizard-of-Oz experiments, that mixed-initiative strategies are appropriate for many types of user, but require more sophisticated architectures for processing of language and dialogue; we then use these observations to motivate an architecture which combines parallel deep and shallow natural language analysis engines and an agenda-driven dialogue manager. We outline the top-level processing strategy used by the dialogue manager, and also a novel formalism, which we call Flat Utterance Description, that allows us to reduce the output of the deep and shallow language-processing engines to a common representation.

Original publication 1999-12-30	Postscript part I -- Checksum Checksum (old) Information about recalculation of checksum Postscript part II -- Checksum II Checksum II (old) Information about recalculation of checksum