From Manual Text to Instructional Dialogue: an Information State Approach

We present preliminary research on the relation between written manuals and instructional dialogue, and outline how a manual can be converted into a format which can be used as domain knowledge by a dialogue system, capable of generating both instructional dialogue and monologue. Starting from a short sample text from a manual, we use the TRINDI information state approach (Traum et al., 1999) to build an experimental dialogue system capable of instructing a user to perform the task. IMDiS, a small experimental implementation based on the GoDiS dialogue system (Bohlin et al., 1999), is presented. 1. Goal of the paper In this paper, we will present preliminary research on the relation between written manuals and instructional dialogue. We outline how a manual can be converted into a format which can be used as domain knowledge by a dialogue system, capable of generating both instructional dialogue and monologue. Starting from a short sample text from a manual, we use the TRINDI information state approach (Traum et al., 1999) to build an experimental dialogue system capable of instructing a user to perform the task. IMDiS, a small experimental implementation based on the GoDiS dialogue system (Bohlin et al., 1999), is presented. We look at sample monologue and dialogue output and discuss the advantages provided by the dialogue mode in IMDiS. One of the main advantages is that the user can control the dialogue to make the system provide exactly the information needed. Finally, we discuss possible research issues. We will make two basic assumptions: monologue is a special case of dialogue, and discourse structure corresponds to task structure. These assumptions are by no means original (see e.g. (Grosz and Sidner, 1986)); however, the preliminary work here attempts to combine these assumptions using the TRINDI information state approach to investigate the possibility of generating dialogue (as in built-in automatic assistant) or monologue (as in a traditional written manual) from a single database of domain task plans.