Generating Tailored, Comparative Descriptions in Spoken Dialogue

We describe an approach to presenting information in spoken dialogues that for the first time brings together multi-attribute decision models, strategic content planning, state-of-the-art dialogue management, and realization which incorporates prosodic features. The system selects the most important subset of available options to mention and the attributes that are most relevant to choosing between them, based on the user model. It also determines how to organize and express descriptions of selected options and attributes, including determination of information structure and rhetorical structure at the level of content planning, resulting in descriptions which, we hypothesize, are both memorable and easy for users to understand.