An educational dialogue system with a user controllable dialogue manager

We have developed an educational environment for a modular spoken dialogue system. The aim of the environment is to provide students, with different backgrounds, means to understand the behaviour of spoken dialogue systems. Focus in this paper is on dialogue and dialogue management. The dialogue is recorded in a dialogue tree whose nodes are dialogue objects. The dialogue objects model the constituents of the dialogue and consist of parameters for modelling dialogue structure, focus structure and a process description describing the actions of the dialogue system. Various dialogue system behaviours can be achieved by modifying these parameters. This is done using the educational environment, which is interactive and facilitates examination, expansion and modification of the dialogue object parameters and hence the system. The educational system has been used in a number of courses at various universities in Sweden.