Efficient Spoken Dialogue Domain Representation and Interpretation

We provide a detailed look on the functioning of the OwlSpeak Spoken Dialogue Manager, which is part of the EU-funded project ATRACO. OwlSpeak interprets Spoken Dialogue Ontologies and on this basis generates VoiceXML dialogue snippets. The dialogue snippets can be interpreted by all speech servers that provide VoiceXML support and therefore make the dialogue management independent from the hosting systems providing speech recognition and synthesis. Ontologies are used within the framework of our prototype to represent specific spoken dialogue domains that can dynamically be broadened or tightened during an ongoing dialogue. We provide an exemplary dialogue encoded as OWL model and explain how this model is interpreted by the dialogue manager. The combination of a unified model for dialogue domains and the strict model-view-controller architecture that underlies the dialogue manager lead to an efficient system that allows for a new way of spoken dialogue system development and can be used for further research on adaptive spoken dialogue strategies.