A Two-Stage Bayesian Network for Effective Development of Conversational Agent

Abstract

Conversational agent is a system that provides user with proper information and maintains the context of dialogue based on natural language. When experts design the network for conversational agent of a domain, the network is usually very complicated and is hard to be understood. So the simplification of network by separating variables in the domain is helpful to design the conversational agent more efficiently. Composing Bayesian network as two stages, we aim to design conversational agent easily and analyze user's query in detail. Also, by using previous information of dialogue, it is possible to maintain the context of conversation. Actually implementing it for a guide of web pages, we can confirm the usefulness of the proposed architecture for conversational agent. © Springer-Verlag 2003.