A Task Independent Oral Dialogue Model

A TASK INDEPENDENT ORAL DIALOGUE MODEL Erie Bil~nge CAP GEMINI ~NNOVATION 118, rue de Tocque~|!!~ 75017 Paris. France and IRISA Lannion e-mail: bilanp~¢rp.capsogeti.fr ABSTRACT This paper presents a human-machine dia- logue model in the field of task-oriented dialogues. The originality of this model resides in the clear separation of dialogue knowledge from task knowl- edge in order to facilitate for the modeling of di- alogue strategies and the maintenance of dialogue coherence. These two aspects are crucial in the field of oral dialogues with a machine consider- ing the current state of the art in speech recogni- tion and understanding techniques. One impor- tant theoretical innovation is that our dialogue model is based on a recent linguistic theory of di- alogue modeling. The dialogue model considers real-life situations, as our work was based on a real man-machine corpus of dialogues. In this paper we describe the model and the de- signed formalisms used in the implementation of a dialogue manager module inside an oral dialogue system. An important outcome and proof of our model is that it is able to dialogue on three differ- • ent applications. 1 Introduction The work presented here is a dialogue model for oral task oriented dialogues. This model is used and under development in the SUNDIAL ESPRIT project I whose aim is to develop an oral coopera- tive dialogue system. Many researchers have observed that oral dia- logue is not merely organized as a cascade of ad- jacency pairs as Schlegoff and Sacks {1973} sug. gested. Task oriented dialogues have been ana- lyzed from different point of view: discourse seg- mentation {Grosz & Sidner, 1986}, exchange seg- mentation with a triplet organization {Moeschler, 19891, initiative in dialogue {Walker & Whittaker, 1990}, etc. From a computational point of view, in task ori~ • : r:; 1This project is partially funded by the Commission for the European Communities ESPRIT programme, as pro- " ject 2218. The partners in this project are CAP GEMINI INNOVATION, CNET, CSELT, DAIMLER-BENZ, ER- .... LANGEN University, INFOVOXj IRISA, LOGICA, PO-~ LITECHNICO DI TORINOj SARIN, SIEMENS, SUR- , REY University ented dialogues planning techniques have received a fair amount of attention {Allen et al, 1982; Lit- man & Allen, 1984). In the latter approach there is no means to de- scribe and deal with pure discursive phenom- ena {meta-communication) such as oral misunder- standing, initiative keeping, initiative giving etc, Whilst in the first approaches there is no attempt to develop a full dialogue system, except in Grosz's and Sidner's {1986) model that unfortunately does not cover all oral dialogue phenomena (Bilange et al, 1990b). In oral conversation, meta-communication rep- resents a large proportion of all possible phenom- ena and is not simple to deal with, especially if we strive to obtain natural dialogues. Therefore, we developed a computational model able to have clear views on happenings at the task level and at the level of the communication itself. This model is not based on pure intuition but has been val- idated in …

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