Method for managing mixed initiative human-machine dialogues based on interactive speech

Abstract

Method for managing mixed-initiative human-machine dialogues based on speech interaction exploiting the separation between general dialogue knowledge, such as communicative acts, which can be used in multiple application domains, and particular linguistic knowledge, which are domain-specific parameters, to process the dialogue as a sequence of changes of status. Each status consist in a set of features linked both to the processed parameters and to the linguistic and pragmatic context, and describes a certain instant of the communicative situation between the user and the system so to discriminate it from other situations that are also only slightly different. The method employs three components. A first component which, given the various parameters of the domain, defines the parameters on which to intervene to modify the status with the intent of converging towards a situation in which all parameters are acquired with a certain value; in parallel, the component identifies the Communicative Act (CA) which applied to these parameters can make the status evolve in the required direction. A second component creates the sentences to be conveyed to user, whereby obtaining a Communicative Act by instancing said parameters. A third component analyses the user's reply to determine the new system status given the parameters that were provided by the user, their mutual coherence, the previous status of these parameters and other correlated parameters.