Platon: Dialog management and rapid prototyping for multilingual multi-user dialog systems

Abstract

We introduce Platon, a domain-specific language for authoring dialog systems based on Groovy, a dynamic programming language for the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). It is a fully-featured tool for dialog management that is also particularly suitable for, but not limited to, rapid prototyping making it possible to create a basic multilingual dialog system with minimal overhead and then gradually extend it to a complete system. It supports multilinguality, multiple users in a single session, and has built-in support for interacting with objects in the dialog environment. It is possible to integrate external components for natural language understanding and generation, while Platon can itself be integrated even in non-JVM projects or run in a stand-alone debugging tool for testing. In this paper we describe important elements of the language and present two scenarios Platon has been used in.