Goal-oriented table-driven design for dialogue manager

Spoken dialogue systems have strong potentiality in becoming the main stream of next generation man/machine interface. To meet this future, spoken dialogue systems must not only be portable to support various applications, but also be scalable to provide capable dialogue to handle sophisticated services. In this paper, we proposed a goal-oriented table-driven approach to design a portable and scalable dialogue manager. In this approach, the dialogue strategy is modeled by a set of tables. Each table in the set handles a simple sub-goal and the tables are organized hierarchically according to a predefined flow to achieve a particular goal. The data sharing property of the proposed approach makes tables become reusable and, consequently, greatly relieves the efforts of scaling-up an old application or developing a new one. In addition, the mixinitiative dialogue management is pursued by incorporating both the system-initiated and the user-initiated table switching mechanisms.