Iterative Development of an Information- Providing Dialogue System
Pontus Johansson, Lars Degerstedt, Arne Jönsson · 2002
A functional prototype of a dialogue system with a natural language interface was implemented for the Nokia Mediaterminal. The prototype was developed from a generic dialogue system framework called MALIN. The purpose of this rapid prototyping approach is to establish what kind and amount of work that needs to be carried out in order to customize a dialogue system based on the MALIN framework for the chosen domain. The method used is developed for dialogue system construction, and utilizes an iterative approach where conceptual design and implementation are viewed as two distinct steps carried out in parallel. The empirical basis for the design and implementation is a dialogue collection and a corpus provided by the domain knowledge base content. Domain knowledge base content is detailed information about one week of television programmes represented in a relational database. The prototype is confined to allow for single utterances dealing with simple task requests. That is, dialogue management is allowed for designwise, but is not implemented, in order to incorporate it in subsequent iterations. The design and implementation resulted in a modularized system, in which the individual components can be exchanged and/or modified without having to rewrite the whole system. The experiences of the design and implementation work results in suggestions for future research, and a suggestion for a new system architecture that allows for increased portability, scalability, and transportability. These aspects are accounted for from two perspectives: the linguistic aspect and the domain aspect.