Architecture Model and Tools for Perceptual Dialog Systems

Abstract

In this paper, we present an architecture model for context-aware dialog-based services. We consider the term “context” in a broader meaning including presence and location of humans and objects, human behavior, human-to-human or human-to-computer interaction, activities of daily living, etc. We expect that the surrounding environment from which context is gathered is a “smart environment”, i.e. a space (such as office, house, or public area) equipped with different sets of sensors, including audio and visual perception. Designing the underlying perceptual systems is a non-trivial task which involves interdisciplinary effort dealing with the integration of voice and image recognition technologies, situation modeling middleware, and context-aware interfaces into a robust and self-manageable software framework. To support fast development and tuning of dialog-based services, we introduce a simulation framework compliant with the proposed architecture. The framework is capable of gathering information from a broad set of sensors, of an event-based abstraction of such information, interaction with an integrated dialog system, and of a virtual representation of a smart environment in schematic 2D or realistic 3D projections. We elaborate on use-cases of architecture model referring the two projects where our system was successfully deployed.