Towards a Context-Based Dialog Management Layer for Expert Systems

Speech-based conversation agents describe those computer-based entities that interact with humans to help accomplish a certain task via spoken word input. This paper proposes a method of managing spoken dialog interactions in response to recognizing the human user´s goals when accessing an expert system. In particular, a set of goals can co-exist during a single conversation, and that each goal may be presented in an asynchronous manner. Such a stipulation exists to enhance the naturalness of the interaction. Inspired by the Context-Based Reasoning paradigm, the Lifelike dialog system described herein features a goal management system that ultimately controls the behavior of the expert system.