Dialogue Management Based on Entities and Constraints

Yushi Xu and Stephanie Seneff
Spoken Language Systems Group, MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory


Abstract

This paper introduces a new dialogue management framework for goal-directed conversations. A declarative specification defines the domain-specific elements and guides the dialogue manager, which communicates with the knowledge sources to complete the specified goal. The user is viewed as another knowledge source. The dialogue manager finds the next action by a mixture of rule-based reasoning and a simple statistical model. Implementation in the flight-reservation domain demonstrates that the framework enables the developer to easily build a conversational dialogue system.