Conversational Interfaces: A Domain-Independent Architecture for Task- Oriented Dialogues

摘要

This paper motivates and describes a generic framework for dialogue- enabling intelligent agents and devices for task-oriented dialogue. The interface is designed to be a mechanism by which a dialogue front-end can quickly and easily be adapted for use with a wide range of devices or agents. The Conversational Intelligence requisite for participating in a large range of important task-oriented dialogues is identified and decomposed in a modular, device-independent fasion and a specialized recipe scripting language is implemented to encode device-specific information. The recipes in the recipe library compiled from this scripting language are instantiated at run time into Activities, which may be executed by the device (and jointly, by the human operator). In addition, a novel Constraint Management System is implemented in order to exploit the features of natural language which allow humans to naturally expand and restrict the permissible sets of parameters that a particular activity may take on.