Universal Dialogue Specification for Conversational Systems

Spoken Language Dialogue Systems which allow for spontaneous speech are not very widely spread. You nd a few systems in application domains such as train timee table information or ight ticket reservation (see Bernsen et al. (1998) for an overview). One reason for the lack of good interactive dialogue systems is their complexity. To develop a system which is able to handle more than simple commands and phrases requires a lot of experience and time. For every application domain diier-ent kinds of knowledge bases have to be speciied. To be able to accelerate this process and to make it also transparent for nonnexperts we are currently working on methods and tools which support this development. Our aim is to provide specii-cation models which are universal enough to be interpreted within diierent dialogue systems, i.e. diierent implementations of generic conversational systems. With the help of special design methods and a uniform representation of data the tools will allow a consistent speciication of dialogue systems and a transformation between different models. 1