Information state and dialogue management in the TRINDI dialogue move engine toolkit

Abstract

We introduce an architecture and toolkit for building dialogue managers currently being developed in the TRINDI project, based on the notions of information state and dialogue move engine. The aim is to provide a framework for experimenting with implementations of different theories of information state, information state update and dialogue control. A number of dialogue managers are currently being built using the toolkit, and we present overviews of two of them. We believe that this framework will make implementation of dialogue processing theories easier, also facilitating comparison of different types of dialogue systems, thus helping to achieve a prerequisite for arriving at a best practice for the development of the dialogue management component of a spoken dialogue system.