A case-based natural language dialogue system using dialogue act
Norio Inui, T. Ebe, B. Indurkhya, Y. Kotani · 2002
This paper proposes an approach to enhance dialogue capabilities between humans and the computer. In order for a computer system to sustain a natural conversation without constraining the topic, it must be able to generate a natural response to a wide variety of topics. In particular, a good general-purpose dialogue system must be able to infer the user's intention from an utterance and be able to respond to it appropriately. A case-based dialogue system could provide an approach to solve these problems because it can work as an empirical language learner, and can become a better hearer and speaker for the human user as the case database becomes larger during dialogues. The goal of this research is to design an efficient case-base for a dialogue system, which contains dialogues between humans or between a human and a computer. We define "dialogue act", which is a key to finding the user's intention and for searching appropriate cases in the case-base. We describe how to extract useful knowledge from example dialogues and how to choose an optimal case to generate an appropriate response.