Generating dialogues from the description of structured data

Abstract

Generating dialogues from the description of structured data is a part of the WebGen system for generating web-based presentations by means of dialogue. Although the system allows the user to create the most common presentations types, such as personal presentations or blogs, the user may need to add a new presentation type. To add a new presentation type the user must specify the content and structure of the presentation descriptor using the XML Schema, the dialogue interface used to collect requested information and finally the layout of the resulting pages. This paper discusses limitations on the XML Schema structure allowing us to generate dialogue interfaces automatically from the presentation descriptor and basic principles and algorithms used during the transformation. In addition, this paper includes some illustrative examples of the data, corresponding XML Schema, XSL Transformation, resulting VoiceXML document and experiments used to evaluate the user satisfaction with generated dialogues. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009.