Enhancing Conversational Moves for Portable Dialogue Systems

Spoken dialogue interfaces are nding usage in a number of important applications. Conversational moves are the atoms of the interaction between a user and the computer system. We are building a portable toolkit for constructing dialogue interfaces in diier-ent applications. Portability requires that we endow this toolkit with a wide range of conversational moves. The conversational moves conventionally studied apply well to the speciic applications for which they were designed. However, traditional move-sets are too limited for a number of important situations when more general applications are considered. In particular , they are not well-suited to mixed-initiative dialogue , nor to prolonged dialogue, and lack authoriza-tional, transactional, and presentational primitives to adapt to complex backend information systems. We have developed a fuller set of conversational moves based on the analysis of two diierent domains in database access and on the document retrieval application .