To achieve the dialogue corpora required for developing these models we chair the Communicator Evaluation Committee, participate in the development of the logfile standard and metrics used by the community, design the evaluation experiments, and analyze the resulting dialogue corpus. Today there is little or no automation in the design and implementation of complex human-machine dialogue systems.
Systems have to be handcrafted for each new application, and the process is slow and expensive.
To make progress in the automation of the development process of dialogue systems, an approach consists in establishing a formal mathematical framework for describing human-machine dialogue systems. The formal model of a sequential decision process is then used in this project both for development of the dialogue architecture and for the initial handcrafted design of the dialogue strategy. Algorithms for automatic acquisition of MDP parameters are being investigated for automatic optimization of the dialogue strategy. The main characteristic of this scripting language is the ability of its interpreter to run in stateless mode. This means that, at any point in the flow of the script, the interpreter process can be suspended and the state of the script stored in a remote device.