Using System Expectations to Manage User Interactions

This paper presents a new approach to parse multiple data types in Dialogue Systems. In its initial version, our spoken dialogue systems platform had a single and generic parser. However, when developing two new systems, the parser’s complexity increased and data types, like numbers, dates and free text messages, were not correctly interpreted. The solution we present to cope with these problems allows the system to rely on expectations about the flow of the dialogue based on the dialogue history and context. Because these expectations guide the parsing process, a positive impact is achieved in the recognition of objects in the user’s utterance. However, if the user fails to match the system’s expectations, for instance by changing the focus of the conversation, the system is still capable of understanding the input and recognizing the referred objects.