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Language-Processing Strategies and Mixed-Initiative Dialogues

Johan Boye (1), Mats Wirén (1), Manny Rayner (2),
Ian Lewin (2), David Carter (2) and Ralph Becket (2)

(1) Telia Research
Spoken Language Processing
S-123 86 Farsta, Sweden

(2)SRI International
Suite 23, Millers Yard
Cambridge CB21RQ, UK

Abstract:

We describe an implemented spoken-language dialogue system for a travel-planning domain, which accesses a commercially available travel-information web-server and supports a flexible mixed-initiative dialogue strategy. We argue, based on data from initial Wizard-of-Oz experiments, that mixed-initiative strategies are appropriate for many types of user, but require more sophisticated architectures for processing of language and dialogue; we then use these observations to motivate an architecture which combines parallel deep and shallow natural language analysis engines and an agenda-driven dialogue manager. We outline the top-level processing strategy used by the dialogue manager, and also a novel formalism, which we call Flat Utterance Description, that allows us to reduce the output of the deep and shallow language-processing engines to a common representation.





Mats Wiren
Mon Oct 25 13:51:54 MET DST 1999