DIALOGUE MANAGEMENT IN A MIXED-INITIATIVE, COOPERATIVE, SPOKEN LANGUAGE SYSTEM
Sandra Williams · 2003
This paper describes a dialogue manager for a spoken language system which allows people to access their email by making a telephone call. The dialogue manager accomplishes three tasks: 1) it controls interactions between the Natural Language Processing (NLP) components; 2) it coordinates inputs from the speech recogniser, requests to and from the database query module and outputs to the text-to-speech module; and 3) it dynamically builds a model of the conversational structure and interprets the dialogue at a higher level than individual utterances. The model of conversation enables mixed initiative dialogues where either the caller or the system can take control. Callers can converse with the system, asking it to search for and read out email messages and to perform a number of common email tasks such as forwarding messages, replying to messages, deleting messages, and filing messages in folders. Anaphoric references and ellipses are resolved by referring to the component of the conversational model which records the dialogue history. When the dialogue manager cannot find exactly what a user is looking for, it is able to send out a cooperative reply. This reply will give the user some extra information which we hope will be more helpful than just saying "none found". 1.