Formal and natural language generation in the Mercury conversational system
Stephanie Seneff, Joseph H. Polifroni · 2000
This paper describes the generation component of our MERCURY flight reservation conversational system. Generation makes use of the GENESIS-II generation server, which represents a significant redesign from its predecessor, GENESIS. While the main focus is on response generation, we also discuss a variety of other generation needs that are fulfilled by GENESIS-II. These include a paraphrase of the user query back into English and into a flattened electronic form, the paraphrase of the electronic form into a database query language, and the conversion of flight tables into HTML format. 1. INTRODUCTION Over the past two years, we have been developing a conversational system that provides access to real flight information, world wide. The system, called Mercury, which has been implemented within the GALAXY communicator architecture [4], adopts a mixed-initiative dialogue model in which the system prompts for information but the user is not required to comply. In [5], we described the Me...