Managing Spoken Dialogues for Information Services

This paper presents an approach to managing spoken dialogues in information services systems. We describe how the approach, based upon a tri--partite model of interaction, addresses the problems of co--operativeness and portability across languages and task domains. This approach has been implemented in the generic dialogue manager of the Sundial dialogue systems. We outline the capabilities of this dialogue manager and describe our testing methodology. Keywords: Oral Dialogue, Dialogue Management, Interpretation of Utterances, Cooperative System 1 Introduction Management of spoken dialogues requires the interpretation of the user utterances and the generation of system utterances coherent with user utterances. The underlying model of interaction is partitioned into semantic, task and dialogue models (cf. [4]). Utterances in different languages are mapped into a common semantic representation language from which instances of the semantic, task and dialogue models are constructed. Se..