Rapid Prototyping of Form-driven Dialogue Systems Using an Open-source Framework

Most human-machine communication for information access through speech, text and graphical interfaces are mediated by forms – i.e. lists of named fields. However, deploying form-filling dialogue systems still remains a challenging task due to the effort and skill required to author such systems. We describe an extension to the OpenDial framework that enables the rapid creation of functional dialogue systems by non-experts. The dialogue designer specifies the slots and their types as input and the tool generates a domain specification that drives a slot-filling dialogue system. The presented approach provides several benefits compared to traditional techniques based on flowcharts, such as the use of probabilistic reasoning and flexible grounding strategies.