An agent-based approach to dialogue management in personal assistants

ABSTRACT

Personal assistants need to allow the user to interact with the system in a flexible and adaptive way such as through spoken language dialogue. In this research we focus on an application in which the user can use a variety of devices to interact with a collection of personal assistants each specializing in a task domain such as email or calendar management, information seeking, etc. We propose an agent-based approach for developing the dialogue manager that acts as the central point maintaining continuous user-system interaction and coordinating the activities of the assistants. In addition, this approach enables development of multi-modal interfaces. We describe our initial implementation which contains an email management agent that the user can interact with through a spoken dialogue and an interface on PDAs. The dialogue manager was implemented by extending a BDI agent architecture.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.2 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Additional Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.2 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
      I.2.7 Natural Language Processing

General Terms:
Human Factors

Keywords:
BDI agent architecture, dialogue modelling, personal assistant