Spoken Natural Language Dialog Systems: A Practical Approach
Authors:
Ronnie W. Smith and D. Richard Hipp
Published by Oxford University Press (copyright 1994--in print January 1995)
ISBN 0-19-509187-6
Summary
This book addresses the dialog issues that must be resolved in building
effective spoken natural language dialog systems. We present an architecture
for dialog processing for which an implementation has been constructed that
exhibits a number of behaviors required for efficient human-machine dialog
including
- problem solving to help the user carry out a task
- coherent subdialog movement during the problem solving process
- user model usage to determine what is known by the user and what must be told
- expectation usage for contextual interpretation and error correction
- variable initiative behavior for interacting with users of differing expertise
The system was experimentally evaluated using eight different users engaged in
a total of 141 problem-solving tasks. Detailed results on the system's
performance in these dialogs are included. Readers should gain an
understanding of how to construct a spoken natural language dialog system
capable of exhibiting the necessary behaviors for effective human-computer
natural language interaction.
Reviews
- Computational Linguistics, September 1996.