Generic and domain-specific aspects of the Waxholm NLP and dialog modules

Gives an overview of the NLP (natural language processing) and dialog components in the Waxholm spoken dialog system. We discuss how the dialog and the natural language components are modeled from a generic and a domain-specific point of view. Dialog management based on grammatical rules and lexical semantic features is implemented in our parser. The notation to describe the syntactic rules has been expanded to cover some of our special needs to model the dialog. The parser runs with two different time scales, corresponding to the words in each utterance and to the turns in the dialog. Topic selection is accomplished based on probabilities calculated from user initiatives. Results from parser performance and topic prediction are included in this paper