Dialogue management in the Mercury flight reservation system
Stephanie Seneff, Joseph H. Polifroni · 2000
This paper describes the dialogue module of the Mercury system, which has been under development over the past year or two. Mercury provides telephone access to an on-line flight database, and allows users to plan and price itineraries between major airports worldwide. The main focus of this paper is the dialogue control strategy, which is based on a set of ordered rules as a mechanism to manage complex dialogue interactions. The paper also describes the interactions between the dialogue component and the other servers of the system, mediated via a central hub. We evaluated the system on 49 dialogues from users booking real flights, and report on a number of quantitative measures of the dialogue interaction.