The Design of Dialogue Management in a Mixed Initiative Chinese Spoken Dialogue System Engine

In this paper, we propose a domain-transparent design of dialogue management in a mixed initiative Chinese spoken dialogue system engine. This design pushes the domaindependent parts of the dialogue management to the external task configure file, leaving the dialogue manager independent of the domain. The task configure file consists of a set of states each of which is associated with a task action and the constraint to apply the action, not the internal and external resources available for the system. Thus, the count of the states is decreased. It is convenient for designing the dialogue system in a specified domain and porting it to another domain, which is only need to replace the task configure file, leaving the dialogue manager unchanged. Applying this design, the effort of porting a spoken dialogue system across different domain can be relieved.