A Platform for the Development of Spoken Dialog Systems

In this paper, we present a platform for the development of dialog systems. The architecture is organized in modules, each of which accomplishes a specific objective. Communication among modules is done by means of transmission of XML data packages through sockets. This platform allows for multimodal communication and permits an easy interchange of modules, so that the change of language or task is straightforward. In our system, most of the modules use stochastic models for the representation of the different knowledge sources involved in the dialog process. These models are automatically learnt from corpora of training data. We also present a dialog system developed with this platform. The task of the dialog system presented is the access to information about train timetables and prices of trains in Spanish.