Coupled Pragmatic and Semantic Automata in Spoken Dialogue Management

Dialogue managers are often based explicitly on finite state automata, but the present approach couples this type of dialogue manager with a semantic model (a city map) whose traversal is also formalised with a finite state automaton. The two automata are coupled in a scenario-specific fashion within an emergency rescue dialogue between an accident observer and an ambulance station, i.e. a stress scenario which is essentially different from traditional information negotiation scenarios. The purpose of this use of coupled automata is to develop a prototype dialogue system for investigating semantic alignment and non-alignment in a dialogue. The research on alignment of interlocutors is to improve human-computer communication in a Polish adaptive dialogue system, focusing on the stress scenario. The investigation was performed on two dialogue corpora and resulted in creating a working text-in-speech-out (TISO) dialogue system based on the two linked finite-state automata, evaluated with about 130 human users.