Skip to main content

A Multiagent-Based Technique for Dialog Management in Conversational Interfaces

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
  • 1014 Accesses

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 9662))

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.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.

Buying options

Chapter
USD   29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD   39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD   54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Learn about institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    https://framenet.icsi.berkeley.edu/fndrupal/.

References

  1. Bangalore, S., DiFabbrizio, G., Stent, A.: Learning the structure of task-driven human-human dialogs. IEEE Trans. Audio Speech Lang. Process. 16(7), 1249–1259 (2008)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Bickmore, T., Puskar, K., Schlenk, E., Pfeifer, L., Sereika, S.: Maintaining reality: relational agents for antipsychotic medication adherence. Interact. Comput. 22, 276–88 (2010)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Ferreira, E., Lefevre, F.: Reinforcement-learning based dialogue system for human-robot interactions with socially-inspired rewards. Comput. Speech Lang. 34(1), 256–74 (2015)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Griol, D., Callejas, Z., López-Cózar, R., Riccardi, G.: A domain-independent statistical methodology for dialog management in spoken dialog systems. Comput. Speech Lang. 28(3), 743–68 (2014)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Hofmann, H., Silberstein, A., Ehrlich, U., Berton, A., Muller, C., Mahr, A.: Development of speech-based in-car HMI concepts for information exchange internet apps. In: Mariani, J., Rosset, S., Garnier-Rizet, M., Devillers, L. (eds.) Natural Interaction with Robots, Knowbots and Smartphones: Putting Spoken Dialog Systems into Practice, pp. 15–28. Springer, New York (2014)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  6. Horchak, O., Giger, J.C., Cabral, M., Pochwatko, G.: From demonstration to theory in embodied language comprehension: a review. Cogn. Syst. Res. 29–30, 66–85 (2014)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Knott, A., Vlugter, P.: Multi-agent human-machine dialogue: issues in dialogue management and referring expression semantics. Artif. Intell. 172(2–3), 69–102 (2008)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Kopp, K., Britt, M., Millis, K., Graesser, A.: Improving the efficiency of dialogue in tutoring. Learn. Instr. 22(5), 320–0 (2012)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Lee, G., Kim, H.K., Jeong, M., Kim, J.: Natural Language Dialog Systems and Intelligent Assistants. Springer, Switzerland (2015)

    Book  Google Scholar 

  10. Metze, F., Anguera, X., Barnard, E., Davel, M., Gravier, G.: Language indep-endent search in mediaeval’s spoken web search task. Comput. Speech Lang. 28(5), 1066–1082 (2014)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Minker, W., Heinroth, T., Strauss, P., Zaykovskiy, D.: Spoken dialogue systems for intelligent environments. In: Aghajan, H., Delgado, R.L.-C., Augusto, J.C. (eds.) Human-Centric Interfaces for Ambient Intelligence, pp. 453–478. Elsevier, Amsterdam (2010)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  12. Misu, T., Raux, A., Gupta, R., Lane, I.: Situated language understanding for a spoken dialog system within vehicles. Comput. Speech Lang. 34, 186–200 (2015)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  13. Ota, R., Kimura, M.: Proposal of open-ended dialog system based on topic maps. Procedia Technol. 17, 122–9 (2014)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  14. Pieraccini, R.: The Voice in the Machine: Building Computers that Understand Speech. MIT Press, Cambridge MA (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Reschke, K., Vogel, A., Jurafsky, D.: Generating recommendation dialogs by extracting information from user reviews. In: Proceedings of the ACL 2013, pp. 499–504 (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Serban, O., Pauchet, A.: Agentslang: a fast and reliable platform for distributed interactive systems. In: Proceedings of the ICCP 2013, pp. 35–42 (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  17. Stent, A., Stenchikova, S., Marge, M.: Reinforcement learning of dialogue strategies with hierarchical abstract machines. In: Proceedings of the SLT 2006, pp. 210–213 (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  18. Stepanov, E., Riccardi, G., Bayer, A.: The development of the multilingual LUNA corpus for spoken language system porting. In: Proceedings of the LREC 2014, pp. 2675–2678 (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  19. Tsai, M.: The VoiceXML dialog system for the e-commerce ordering service. In: Proceedings of the CSCWD 2005, pp. 95–100 (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  20. Tsilfidis, A., Mporas, I., Mourjopoulos, J., Fakotakis, N.: Automatic speech recognition performance in different room acoustic environments with and without dereverberation preprocessing. Comput. Speech Lang. 27(1), 380–95 (2013)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  21. Wu, W.L., Lu, R.Z., Duan, J.Y., Liu, H., Gao, F., Chen, Y.Q.: Spoken language understanding using weakly supervised learning. Comput. Speech Lang. 24(2), 358–82 (2010)

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by Projects MINECO TEC2012-37832-C02-01, CICYT TEC2011-28626-C02-02, CAM CONTEXTS (S2009/TIC-1485).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to David Griol .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

About this paper

Cite this paper

Griol, D., Molina, J.M. (2016). A Multiagent-Based Technique for Dialog Management in Conversational Interfaces. In: Demazeau, Y., Ito, T., Bajo, J., Escalona, M. (eds) Advances in Practical Applications of Scalable Multi-agent Systems. The PAAMS Collection. PAAMS 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9662. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39324-7_11

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39324-7_11

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-39323-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-39324-7

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics