Dialogue management in the Mercury flight reservation system

Abstract

This paper describes the dialogue module of the Mercury system, which has been under development over the past year or two. Mercury provides telephone access to an on-line flight database, and allows users to plan and price itineraries between major airports worldwide. The main focus of this paper is the dialogue control strategy, which is based on a set of ordered rules as a mechanism to manage complex dialogue interactions. The paper also describes the interactions between the dialogue component and the other servers of the system, mediated via a central hub. We evaluated the system on 49 dialogues from users booking real flights, and report on a number of quantitative measures of the dialogue interaction.