Speech Dialogue Systems A “Pragmatics-First” Approach to Rational Interaction

Modelling rational dialogues on the basis of Finite-State Automata has shown to be of limited use when natural speech behaviour and dynamic adaptation to new domains are an issue. To enable such a flexible, robust and generic dialogue management, we rely on an approach characterized by a logically precise modelling of the linguistic and application aspects of the domain in question and a dialogue manager deriving pragmaticsdriven discourse strategies from reasoning on evolving belief structures, both of the user and the system. The feedback cycle between the dialogue manager and the applications is of vital importance, as is the close interaction on the linguistic side occurring between the speech parser, the dialogue manager and the text generation module.