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, our approach establishes a formal mathematical framework for describing human-machine dialogue systems. The mathematical model we proposed is in the form of a sequential decision process. The formal model of a sequential decision process is 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 and learning of the dialogue strategy. The main characteristic of this scripting language is the ability of its interpreter to run in a stateless mode.