Rapidly developing spoken Chinese dialogue systems with the d-ear SDS SDK

Developing a spoken dialog system is typically timeconsuming, and must often be accomplished using difficult-tolearn professional technologies. Most existing toolkits use statistical semantic parsers and model a dialogue interaction as a finite-state network. However, for developing flexible spoken Chinese dialogue systems, these toolkits have several problems. A new toolkit named the d-Ear SDS SDK is introduced here. The SDK suggests a multi-session dialogue system framework with a powerful semantic parser specially designed for spoken Chinese understanding, and a powerful dialogue manager providing non-finite-state dialogue control. To set up a new dialogue system, the developer can customize all the system modules with domain-specific information and operations, using the d-Ear SDS Studio to save time. Using the SDK, we have built several dialogue systems with excellent performance in a very short time.