Affiliations: Dialogue Systems Group, Institute of Communications Engineering, Ulm University, 89081 Ulm, Germany. E-mail: {stefan.ultes,wolfgang.minker}@uni-ulm.de
Note: [] Corresponding author.
Abstract: Speech interfaces within Intelligent Environments (IEs) must be rendered adaptive to external and internal factors, among those the complexity of the dialogue. Hence, we present HIS-OwlSpeak, a model-driven dialogue manager for Intelligent Environments. It meets the challenges arising from engineering IEs by providing a unified platform comprising adaptivity to a variety of internal and external factors. This work addresses internal adaptivity realized by different modes of dialogue control, i.e., rule-based and probabilistic. For this, the Hidden Information State (HIS) approach – featuring inherent handling of uncertainty in dialogue systems – is applied to a model-driven, solely rule-based dialogue manager. It uses ontologies to specify the dialogue thus separating the specification from the dialogue control. Consequently, all necessary aspects for merging the world of model-driven dialogue management with the HIS approach are presented in detail. Furthermore, the system has been evaluated using two concurrent dialogues of different complexity successfully validating the implementation.
