Dialog system

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A Dialog system is a computer system intended to converse with a human. Dialog systems have employed text, speech, graphics, haptics, gestures, face configurations, body positions, emotions, and other modes for communicative intent on both the input and output channel. Architectures for dialog systems vary, but an architecture for a typical spoken dialog system is shown in the figure below.

What does and does not constitute a dialog system may be debatable. The typical GUI wizard does engage in some sort of dialog, but it includes very few of the common dialog system components, and dialog state is trivial.

1 Components
2 Types of Systems
3 Implementations
- 3.1 Toolkits and Architectures
- 3.2 Notable Systems
4 Academics
5 Books
6 See also

[edit] Components

There are many different architectures for dialog systems. What sets of components are included in a dialog system, and how those components divide up responsibilities differs from system to system. Principal to any dialog system is the dialog manager, which is a component or set of components that manages the state of the dialog.

dialog manager
interaction manager
input recognizer/decoder
parser
confidence annotator
multi-modal fusion
output generator
- natural language generator
- gesture generator
- layout engine
output renderer
- text-to-speech engine
- talking head
- robot or avatar

In addition to the components above, which are part of the dialog system proper, there are often other components involved. These other components are common to many computer systems.

real (or virtual) world event detection
operating system
messaging layer
database
logging
i/o devices
[[high-level control system
machine learning facilities

[edit] Types of Systems

Dialog systems fall into many categories, the following is a list of such categories along a few dimensions. Many of the following categories overlap and the distinctions may not be well established.

by device
- telephone-based systems
- PDA systems
- in-car systems
- robot systems
- desktop/laptop systems
  - native
  - in-browser systems
  - in-virtual machine
- in-virtual environment
- robots
by UI/modality
- text-based
- spoken language
- graphical user interface
- multi-modal
by style/initiative
- command-based
- menu-driven
- natural language
- speech graffiti
- computer-initiative
- user-initiative
- mixed-initiative
- task-based
- plan-based
- collaborative
- turn-based
- event-based
by application
- information service
- command-and-control
- entertainment
- education/tutorial
- edutainment
- reminder systems
- companion systems
- healthcare
- eldercare
- assistive/access systems

[edit] Implementations

[edit] Toolkits and Architectures

Galaxy
DIPPER: dialogue prototyping equipment and resources
Olympus
Ariadne
The Universal Speech Interface
Midiki
TRINDIKIT
VXML
- BeVocal Café
- Tellme. Studio
- Quack.com QXML Development Environment.
AIML
SALT

[edit] Notable Systems

See http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dbohus/SDS/, http://www.ling.gu.se/~sl/dialogue_links.html, and http://www.disc2.dk/tools/opSLDSs.html.

[edit] Academics

The study of dialog systems is commonly considered a branch of human-computer interaction, although its origins are generally rooted in the automatic speech recognition community. Current trends are putting more research emphasis on aspects of psychology and linguistics.

[edit] Topics

[edit] Conferences

The Young Researchers Roundtable on Spoken Dialog Systems

[edit] Related Conferences

Interspeech
The International Conference on Multi-modal Interaction (ICMI)
The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
The American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)
Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI)
Computer Human Interaction (CHI)
The North American Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL)
SemDial
The International Workshop on Robot and Human Interaction (ROMAN)
Human Robot Interaction (HRI)
Interact
Spoken Language Technology, SLT
Text, Speech, and Discourse (TSD)
Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
Human Language Technology (HLT)
The International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI)
The International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING)
Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding (ASRU)

[edit] Related Journals

Historically, there were no journals devoted specifically to dialog systems. To address this need the Journal of Dialog Systems has been launched: the first journal dedicated particularly to dialog systems, with the goal of becoming the premiere international journal in the field.