Methods to improve its portability of a spoken dialog system both on task domains and languages

This paper presents the methods to improve its portability of a spoken dialog system both on task domains and languages, which have been implemented in Chinese and Japanese in the tasks of sightseeing, accommodation-seeking guidance. Such methods include case frame conversion, template-based text generation and topic frame driven dialog control scheme. The former two methods are for improving the portability across languages, and the last one is for improving the portability across domains. The case frame conversion is used for translating a source language case frame into a pivot language one. The template-based text generation is used for generating text responses in a particular language from abstract responses. The topic frame driven dialog control scheme makes it possible to manage mixed-initiative dialog based on a set of task-dependent topic frames. The experiments showed that the proposed methods could be used to improve the portability of a dialog system across domains and languages.