The Information State Approach to Dialogue Management

Abstract

We introduce the information state approach to dialog mangement and show how it can be used to formalize theories of dialog in a manner suitable for easy implementation. We also show how this approach can lead to better engineering of dialog management components of dialog systems, allowing for separate development of modular system fundamentals, dialog theories, and domain-specific dialogue systems, in a manner where components can more easily be reused. TrindiKit is a tool instantiating the lowest level, and allowing straightforward implementation of dialog theories formalized using the information state approach. We briefly describe several dialog systems built using TrindiKit, and how components have been successfully further developed and reused in other projects.