A task ontology model for domain independent dialogue management

Dialogue systems have been a rapidly growing area in the field of human computer interaction. They can be applied in various fields, such as education, business and healthcare. Due to its complexity, the design and development of a dialogue system is time consuming and costly. It is highly desirable for a generic dialogue system, especially dialogue management that is independent of specific domains. Methods for domain independent dialogue systems have been proposed in previous research, however each of them has its own limitations. This paper presents a new approach, a task ontology model for domain independent dialogue management. An abstract task ontology is developed and based on that a generic dialogue manager is created. Knowledge about a specific task is modeled in its task ontology and retrieved by an ontology reasoning component situated in the dialogue manager. Thus the dialogue system based on this model is task or domain independent. The dialogue system has been experimented with two different tutorial tasks: the book borrowing and the online train ticket booking. The results indicate that the dialogue system can be readily applied to tasks from different domains. This paper has implications on future research and development of domain independent dialogue systems and its application in tutoring and training in virtual environments. It also contributes to the knowledge sharing and reuse of human computer interfaces.