Structured dialogue models are the most commonly used dialogue models in commercial systems, particularly as they are relatively easy to design and re-use. The current paper reports on a study that examined the feasibility of combining more flexible dialogue control with a structured dialogue model. Several systems were built using the RAD (Rapid Application Developer) component of the CSLU too...

For tutorial dialogue systems, selecting an appropriate dialogue move to support learners can significantly influence cognitive and affective outcomes. The strategies implemented in tutorial dialogue systems have historically been based on handcrafted rules derived from observing human tutors, but a data-driven model of strategy selection may increase the effectiveness of tutorial dialogue syst...

Conversational Language Understanding (CLU) is a key component of goal oriented dialogue systems that would parse user utterances into semantic frame representations. Traditionally CLU does not utilize the dialogue history beyond the previous system turn and contextual ambiguities are resolved by the downstream components. In this paper, we explore novel approaches for modeling dialogue context...

This paper reports our progress in building a mixed initiative, goal-oriented dialogue system for human machine interactions. The dialogue model embraces the spirits of the so-called planbased approach in that the dialogue flow is not statically authored but dynamically generated by the system as a natural outcome of the semantic evaluation process. With multimodal applications in mind, the dia...

Learning and improving natural turn-taking behaviors for dialogue systems is a topic of growing importance. In task-oriented dialogue where the user can engage in task actions in parallel with dialogue, unrestricted turn taking may be particularly important for dialogue success. This paper presents a novel Markov Decision Process (MDP) representation of dialogue with unrestricted turn taking an...

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 stre...

Entrainment is a factor in dialogue that affects not only human-human but also human-machine interaction. While entrainment on the lexical level is well documented, less is known about how entrainment affects dialogue on a more abstract, structural level. In this paper, we investigate the effect of entrainment on dialogue acts and on lexical choice given dialogue acts, as well as how entrainmen...

Recently, a number of authors have proposed treating dialogue systems as Markov decision processes (MDPs). However, the practical application of MDP algorithms to dialogue systems faces a number of severe technical challenges. We have built a general software tool (RLDS, for Reinforcement Learning for Dialogue Systems) based on the MDP framework, and have applied it to dialogue corpora gathered...

Spoken language dialogue systems represent the peak of achievement in speech technologies in the 20 th century and appear set to form the basis for the increasingly natural interactive systems to follow in the coming decades. This chapter first presents a model of the task-oriented spoken dialogue system, its multiple aspects and some of the remaining research challenges. In the context of this...

Das diesem Bericht zugrundeliegende Forschungsvorhaben wurde mit Mitteln des Bundesministers f ur Forschung und Technologie unter dem FF orderkenn-zeichen 01 IV 101 K/1 geff ordert. Die Verantwortung f ur den Inhalt dieser Arbeit liegt bei den Autoren. Abstract We present the dialogue component of the speech-to-speech translation system verbmobil. In contrast to conventional dialogue systems it...