A multiagent-based technique for dialog management in conversational interfaces

Abstract

With the advances in Language Technologies and Natural Language Processing, conversational interfaces have begun to play an increasingly important role in the design of human-machine interaction systems in a number of devices and intelligent environments. One of the most demanding tasks when developing a dialog system consists of selecting the next system response considering the user’s actions and the dialog history, which is the fundamental task related to dialog management. In this paper we present an multiagent-based technique for the development of dialog managers. In our proposal, a multiagent system with specialized dialog agents is designed to deal with each specific subtask of dialog objective for which the dialog system has been designed. The practical application of the proposed technique to develop a dialog system acting as a customer support service shows that the use of these specialized dialog agents increases the quality and number of successful interactions with the system in comparison with developing a single agent to manage the dialog for the complete domain.