SALT: An XML Application for Web-based Multimodal Dialog Management

This paper describes the Speech Application Language Tags, or SALT, an XML based spoken dialog standard for multimodal or speech-only applications. A key premise in SALT design is that speech-enabled user interface shares a lot of the design principles and computational requirements with the graphical user interface (GUI). As a result, it is logical to introduce into speech the object-oriented, event-driven model that is known to be flexible and powerful enough in meeting the requirements for realizing sophisticated GUIs. By reusing this rich infrastructure, dialog designers are relieved from having to develop the underlying computing infrastructure and can focus more on the core user interface design issues than on the computer and software engineering details. The paper focuses the discussion on the Web-based distributed computing environment and elaborates how SALT can be used to implement multimodal dialog systems. How advanced dialog effects (e.g., cross-modality reference resolution, implicit confirmation, multimedia synchronization) can be realized in SALT