Beyond structured dialogues: factoring out grounding
Peter A. Heeman, Michael O. Johnston, Justin C. Denney, Edward Kaiser · 1998
Structured dialogue models are currently the only tools for easily building spoken dialogue systems. This approach, however, requires the dialogue designer to completely specify all dialogue behavior between the user and system, including how information is grounded between the user and the system. In this paper, we advocate factoring out the grounding behavior from structured dialogue models by using a general purpose dialogue manager that accounts for this behavior. This not only simplifies the specification of dialogue, but also allows more powerful mechanisms of grounding to be employed, which cannot be implemented within the framework of structured dialogues. 1. INTRODUCTION As speech recognition and speech synthesis continue to improve, spoken dialogue systems have started to emerge. However, significant barriers remain in building effective spoken dialogue systems. There will always be errors in speech recognition, and unfortunately, natural language understanding and dialogue...