A Robust Approach For Handling Oral Dialogues

Present limits of speech recognition and understandi¢,g in the context of free spoken language (alttumgh with a limited vocabulary) have perverse effects on the flow of the dialogue with a system. Typically a non robtt~'t dialogue manager will fail to face with these limits and conversations will often be a failure. This paper presents some possibilities of a structural approach for handling communication failures in task-oriented oral dialogues. Several types of communication failures are presented and explained. They must be dealt with by the dialogue manager if we strike to have a robt~t system. The exposed strategies for handling these failures are based on a structural approach of the conversation and are implemented in the SUNDIAL ,wstem. We first recall some aspects of the model and then describe the strategies for preventing and repairing communication Jailure in oral conversations with a system.