Our primary algorithmic focus will be on the emerging technologies of natural language generation, dialog management, and natural language understanding. We will modify our natural language understanding, natural language generation, and dialog management systems to comply with the initial architecture specification. As we gain experience with it, we will provide feedback on the architecture as appropriate. For example, in a travel application it might be natural to check the weather at one's destination or one's bank balance in the middle of purchasing an airline ticket. We think that this will provide a basic framework for distributed conversational applications similar to the current web model which allows through URL s the switching between various web applications.
Several issues require attention.
The dialog manager should confirm irreversible actions. Other actions may also warrant confirmation. We will explore automatic methods for learning user's preferred style of relaxation. These are complicated data structures and will require new algorithms to maintain focus between the alternatives. We will continue to enhance our data-driven statistical parser.