Dialogue is at the same time the most fundamental and broadly used form of language, as well as the most complex one. And most of all, dialogue is the most natural medium of communication for human beings. It is these aspects of dialogue that make its modelling a research area of its own, and one of greatest interest at that. In many cases of interaction between humans and machines, using dialogue may enables better results with regard to the target each time.
In these series of lectures we are going to address the issue of dialogue and dialogue management.
In the first lecture we are going to look at some existing dialogue systems and evaluate their performance with regard to the general characteristics that a dialogue system should exhibit. We will consider different approaches to dialogue management and assess their methods of dealing with different dialogue characteristics.
In the second lecture we will have a closer look at systems based on finite state automata (FSA). We will consider their possibilities and limitations by exploring the dialogue specifications necessary and their manipulation in FSA. In the case where the system does not currently cater for all desirable dialogue properties, we will weigh the possibility of extending it.
In this lecture, we will come to more complex dialogue modeling and will discuss a more powerful systems We will talk about speech and dialogue acts, their relation and the way they are used to facilitate dialogue modeling. We will also address the issue of general system architectures to the extent that they partake of or influence dialogue management.