Objectives achieved:

This research successfully demonstrated how a practical spoken dialogue manager (DM) could be developed as suite of inheriting and collaborating object-based components. The architecture of the DM reflected the generic and specialised dialogue tasks that exist in human-human dialogues. In this way it enhanced the system’s extensibility and maintainability and enabled a single implementation to operate across several different business domains. For an end-to-end solution, the DM was integrated with a number of third-party system components (including the well-proven GALAXY hub) that were used in the DARPA Communicator family of applications. Our system thus became known as the Queen’s Communicator. It has since served as a model to other researchers wishing to adopt a hierarchical, object-oriented approach to spoken dialogue management.

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