An architecture for dialogue management, context tracking, and pragmatic adaptation in spoken dialogue systems

Abstract

This paper details a software architecture for discourse processing in spoken dialogue systems, where the three component tasks of discourse processing are (1) Dialogue Management, (2) Context Tracking, and (3) Pragmatic Adaptation. We define these three component tasks and describe their roles in a complex, near-future scenario in which multiple humans interact with each other and with computers in multiple, simultaneous dialogue exchanges. This paper reports on the software modules that accomplish the three component tasks of discourse processing, and an architecture for the interaction among these modules and with other modules of the spoken dialogue system. A motivation of this work is reusable discourse processing software for integration with non-discourse modules in spoken dialogue systems. We document the use of this architecture and its components in several prototypes, and also discuss its potential application to spoken dialogue systems defined in the near-future scenario.

Multi-tasking and collaborative activities in dialogue systems

“…The idea of Activity Modelling in our system is the vision that dialogue systems can, in generality, be built for 'devices' which carry out certain well- ), and that an important part of the dialogue context to be modelled in such a system is the device's planned activities, current activities, and their execution status 5 . We choose to focus on building this class of dialogue systems because we share with (Allen et al, 2001), a version of the the Practical Dialogue 5 Compare this with the motivation behind the "Pragmatic Adapter" idea of (LuperFoy et al, 1998).…”