Utterance generation for transaction dialogues
Joris Hulstijn, Arjan van Hessen · 1998
This paper discusses the utterance generation module of a spoken dialogue system for transactions. Transactions are interesting because they involve obligations of both parties: the system should provide all relevant information; the user should feel committed to the transaction once it has been concluded. Utterance generation plays a major role in this. The utterance generation module works with prosodically annotated utterance templates. An appropriate template for a given dialogue act is selected by the following parameters: utterance type, body of the template, given information, wanted and new information. Templates respect rules of accenting and deaccenting. 1 INTRODUCTION Generation of appropriate system utterances for spoken dialogue systems is not trivial, especially when the dialogue involves transactions, as in systems for distant selling or ticket reservation. Dialogues that involve transactions display a more complex structure than mere inquiry or advisory dialogues. Two...