Domain-Level Reasoning for Spoken Dialogue Systems

Reasoning for Information: Seeking and Planning Dialogues provides a logic-based reasoning component for spoken language dialogue systems. This component, called Problem Assistant is responsible for processing constraints on a possible solution obtained from various sources, namely user and the system's domain-specific information. The authors also present findings on the implementation of a dialogue management interface to the Problem Assistant. The dialogue system supports simple mixed-initiative planning interactions in the TRAINS domain, which is still a relatively complex domain involving a number of logical constraints and relations forming the basis for the collaborative problem-solving behavior that drives the dialogue.

Dirk Bühler holds a Ph.D. and MSc in Computer Science from the University of Ulm and University of Tübingen (Germany), respectively. His research interests concern the development and evaluation of user interfaces, including dialogue modelling and multimodality, domain modelling, knowledge representation, and automated reasoning. He worked at DaimlerChrysler, Research and Technology, Germany, from 2000 to 2002. He is now with SVOX Ulm (Germany). Wolfgang Minker is a full‐time Professor at the University of Ulm, Institute for Information Technology (Germany). He received his Ph.D. in Engineering Science from the University of Karlsruhe (Germany) in 1997 and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Paris-Sud (France) in 1998. He has been Researcher at the Laboratoire d'Informatique pour la Mécanique et les Sciences de l'Ingénieur (LIMSI‐CNRS), France, from 1993 to 1999 and member of the scientific staff at DaimlerChrysler, Research and Technology (Germany) from 2000 to 2002. Dr. Minker is highly regarded in the speech and spoken language field and actively participates in major workshops on this related topic such as the just concluded, IEEE Workshop on Spoken Language.