An Automatic Dialogue Generation Platform for Personalized Dialogue Applications
01 April 2004
A voice user interface for human-machine communication ideally should use a dialogue structure personalized to an individual user, subject to the constraints of the system. Conventional methods for dialogue development typically use dialogue architectures that create a set of predefined speech objects or subdialogues by combining several static components, such as grammars and other language components. The Limitation of such methods is that most databases are dynamic, and users have different preferences for topical content and presentation format. Ideally, a dialogue would combine a user's intentions, encoded in a profile, with information and services available in a dynamic and distributed external environment. We use a modular architecture where a centralized Application Generator (AG) interacts with two managers. A user's preferences are stored in a profile handled by a Profile Manager. An Information Manager uses those preferences when accessing external databases and extracting, filtering, or presenting information in a form customized to that particular user. the AG then builds an anticipated dialogue, allowing a user to navigate between a personalized set of service, each of which presents information and service in a manner customized for that user. Therefore, the AG generates, in a uniform and consistent manner, a finite state dialogue for any task described by a set of specifications residing on a distributed network. Finally, a dialogue manger uses a set of protocols to carry out an actual dialogue session with the user