Utterance generation for transaction dialogues

This paper discusses the utterance generation module of a spoken dialogue system for transactions. Transactions are interesting because they involve obligations of both parties: the system should provide all relevant information; the user should feel committed to the transaction once it has been concluded. Utterance generation plays a major role in this. The utterance generation module works with prosodically annotated utterance templates. An appropriate template for a given dialogue act is selected by the following parameters: utterance type, body of the template, given information, wanted and new information. Templates respect rules of accenting and deaccenting.