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.
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Notes
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A complete documentation is available as a separate technical report [4] with details about the language definition and the implementation of Platon.
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Since all agents on the stack are active and can manipulate the stack, the call semantics are actually more complex than for example with regular functions. By default, agent changes are handled as if the agent executing the operations were on top of the stack, removing other agents covering the caller. This leads to the behavior expected for a regular function call. If required, this “stack cutting” mechanism can be disabled for each call. See [4] for details.
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MaryTTS: http://mary.dfki.de/.
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Sphinx: http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/.
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Acknowledgments
The research presented in this paper has been funded by the Eureka project number E!7152. https://www.lsv.uni-saarland.de/index.php?id=71
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Gropp, M., Schmidt, A., Kleinbauer, T., Klakow, D. (2016). Platon: Dialog Management and Rapid Prototyping for Multilingual Multi-user Dialog Systems. In: Sojka, P., Horák, A., Kopeček, I., Pala, K. (eds) Text, Speech, and Dialogue. TSD 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9924. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45510-5_55
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