Strategies for accelerating the design of dialogue applications using heuristic information from the backend database

Nowadays, current commercial and academic platforms for developing spoken dialogue applications lack of acceleration strategies based on using heuristic information from the contents or structure of the backend database in order to speed up the definition of the dialogue flow. In this paper we describe our attempts to take advantage of these information sources using the following strategies: the quick creation of classes and attributes to define the data model structure, the semi-automatic generation and debugging of database access functions, the automatic proposal of the slots that should be preferably requested using mixed-initiative forms or the slots that are better to request one by one using directed forms, and the generation of automatic state proposals to specify the transition network that defines the dialogue flow. Subjective and objective evaluations confirm the advantages of using the proposed strategies to simplify the design, and the high acceptance of the platform and its acceleration strategies.