Integrating flexibility into a structured dialogue model: some design considerations

Abstract

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 toolkit, augmented with the Phoenix natural language parsing system and a dialogue manager that used a representation of the system’s information state to determine the system’s next question or action. Results indicated that with an optimized continuous speech recognizer a dialogue permitting flexible input can be concluded efficiently and successfully, while in cases of degraded recognition the recovery strategies and more structured dialogue control enhance the likelihood of a successful transaction. The paper discusses a number of design issues that support developers in making structured dialogue models more flexible.