A Dialogue Manager for the DIALOG Demonstrator

Abstract

The DIALOG project investigates flexible natural language tutorial dialogue in mathematics, and as such it is essential that the system includes a dedicated module to facilitate and control interaction with the tutor. In this report we present the design and implementation of the dialogue manager for the demonstrator system of the DIALOG project. We begin with a brief survey of some approaches to dialogue management, followed by an overview of the system and a description of the modules which are part of the demonstrator. The dialogue manager is an information state update based manager built on a platform for dialogue management applications called Rubin. We describe the functionality of the Rubin platform before giving the specification of the dialogue manager itself, including its input rules and the structure of the information state. Finally we discuss some aspects of the system, its implementation, and the pros and cons of using the Rubin platform.