Towards the Interpretation of Utterance Sequences in a Dialogue System

Ingrid Zukerman, Patrick Ye, Kapil Kumar Gupta and Enes Makalic

SIGDIAL Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL 2009)
Queen Mary University of London, September 11-12, 2009

Summary

This paper describes a probabilistic mechanism for the interpretation of utterance sequences developed for a spoken dialogue system mounted on a robotic agent. The mechanism receives as input a sequence of sentences, and produces an interpretation which integrates the interpretations of individual sentences. For our evaluation, we collected a corpus of hypothetical requests to a robot. A preliminary evaluation with pairs of sentences shows that our mechanism exhibits good performance for sentences of different length and complexity. We are currently in the process of evaluating complete sentence sequences.