A Situation-Based Dialogue Management using Dialogue Examples

Abstract

In this paper, we present POSTECH Situation-Based Dialogue Manager (POSSDM) for a spoken dialogue system using both example- and rule-based dialogue management techniques for effective generation of appropriate system responses. A spoken dialogue system should generate cooperative responses to smoothly control dialogue flow with the users. We introduce a new dialogue management technique incorporating dialogue examples and situation-based rules for the Electronic Program Guide (EPG) domain. For the system response generation, we automatically construct and index a dialogue example database from the dialogue corpus, and the proper system response is determined by retrieving the best dialogue example for the current dialogue situation, which includes a current user utterance, dialogue act, semantic frame and discourse history. When the dialogue corpus is not enough to cover the domain, we also apply manually constructed situation-based rules mainly for meta-level dialogue management. Experiments show that our example-based dialogue modeling is very useful and effective in domain-oriented dialogue processing.