A spoken dialogue system utilizing spatial information
Annika Flycht-Eriksson, Arne Jönsson · 1998
Spatial reasoning plays an important role in many spoken dialogue systems. One application area where it is especially important is timetable information for local bus traffic. Users of such systems often request information based on vague spatial descriptions and a usable system must be able to handle this. We have extended a dialogue system with abilities to transform vague spatial expressions into a form that can be used to access the information base. In our approach we use the power of a Geographical Information System (GIS) for the spatial reasoning. 1. Introduction Spoken dialogue systems providing timetable information for local bus traffic requires both temporal and spatial reasoning capabilities. Temporal reasoning has been investigated in, for instance, Rail traffic information systems [7, 1], but as spatial reasoning is not that prominent in such applications less work has been done in this area. One important difference between Bus traffic information systems and Rail tr...