Natural Language Dialogue Service for Appointment Scheduling Agents

摘要

Appointment scheduling is a problem faced daily by many individuals andorganizations. Cooperating agent systems have been developed to partiallyautomate this task. In order to extend the circle of participants as far aspossible we advocate the use of natural language transmitted by e-mail. Wedescribe COSMA, a fully implemented German language server for existingappointment scheduling agent systems. COSMA can cope with multiple dialogues inparallel, and accounts for differences in dialogue behaviour between human andmachine agents. NL coverage of the sublanguage is achieved through bothcorpus-based grammar development and the use of message extraction techniques.