A: Yeah .
D: Mmm .
A: And even on on a more basic level the the action planner actually needs to be able to have um an expressive power that can deal with these structures .
F: Hmm ?
A: And not just um say um um the dialogue um will consist of ten possible states and th these states really are fixed in in a certain sense .
F: Would there be any chance of getting the terminology changed so that the dialogue planner was called a " dialogue planner " ?
A: You have to F: Because there 's this other thing The o There 's this other thing in in the tourist domain which is gonna be a route planner
A: That 'd be nice .
F: or It 's really gonna be an action planner .
F: And <comment> i it A: It oughta be called a a dialogue manager .
A: cuz that 's what everybody else calls it .
F: I would think ,
F: yeah .
D: Mmm .
F: Huh ?
A: Yeah .
F: So , s So what would happen if we sent a note saying " Gee we 've talked about this and couldn't we change this uh th the whole word ? "
F: I have no idea how complicated these things are .
B: Probably close to impossible .
A: Depends on who you talk to how .
A: We 'll see .
A: I 'll go check ,
A: cause I completely agree .
D: Mmm .
A: Yeah ,
A: and I think this is just for historical reasons within uh , the preparation phase of the project
A: and not because somebody actually believes it ought to be action planner .
A: So if there is resistance against changing it , that 's just because " Oh , We don't want to change things . "
A: That that not deep reason
F: OK ,
F: anyway .
F: I if if that c in persists then we 're gonna need another term . for the thing that actually does the planning of the uh routes and whatever we are doing for the tourist .
B: That 's external services .
F: Yeah , but that 's not g eh tha
F: That ha has all the wrong connotations .
F: it 's it sounds like it 's you know stand alone .
F: It doesn't interact ,
F: it doesn't
F: That 's why I 'm saying .
F: I think you can't F: it 's fine for looking up when T you know when the show 's on TV .
F: You go to th
F: but I I I I think it 's really really wrong headed for something that you that has a lot of state ,
F: it 's gonna interact co in a complicated way with the uh understanding parts .
B: Yeah .
B: Yeah I think just the the spatial planner and the route planner
B: I showed you once the interac action between them among them in the deep map system
F: Right .
B: so a printout of the communication between those two fills up
B: I don't know how many pages
B: and that 's just part of how do I get to one place .
A: Hmm
B: It 's really insane .
B: and uh
B: but um so this is um definitely a good point to get uh Michael into the discussion .
B: Or to enter his discussion , actually .
B: That 's the way around .
A: Yeah , Marcus .
B: Markus
B: Is he new in the in the ?
A: Wh - where 's ?
A: Yeah , he 's he started um I think January .
D: Yeah .
A: And he 's gonna be responsible for the implementation of this action planner .
A: Dialogue manager .
B: Is he gonna continue with the old uh thing ?
A: No ,
A: no he 's completely gonna rewrite everything . In Java .
B: OK .
A: OK so that 's interesting .
B: Yes I was just that 's my next question
A: hmm
B: whether we 're we 're gonna stick to Prolog or not .
A: No .
A: No , that 's gonna be phased out .
F: Yeah .
B: OK
B: But I do think the the function modeling concept has a certain makes sense in a in a certain light
A: Yeah .
B: because the action planner should not be or the dialogue manager in that case should not um w have to worry about whether it 's interfacing with um something that does route planning in this way or that way
A: Mm - hmm .
F: I I totally agree .
F: Sure .
B: huh ,
B: it j
F: Yeah I I agree .
F: There is there 's a logic to dialogue which which is is separable .
F: I
F: Yeah .
B: and it cant sort of formulate its what it wants in a in a rather a abstract uh way ,
B: you know f " Find me a good route for this . "
F: Mm - hmm .
B: It doesn't really have to worry ab how route planner A or how route planner B actually wants it .
B: So this is seemed like a good idea .
B: In the beginning .
F: It 's tricky .
F: It 's tricky because one could well imagine F: I think it will turn out to be the case that uh , this thing we 're talking about , th the extended n uh knowledge modeler will fill in some parameters about what the person wants .
F: One could well imagine that the next thing that 's trying to fill out the detailed uh , route planning , let 's say , will also have questions that it would like to ask the user .
F: You could well imagine you get to a point where it 's got a a choice to make and it just doesn't know something .
F: And so y you would like it t also be able to uh formulate a query .
A: Mm - hmm .
F: And to run that back through uh . the dialogue manager and to the output module and back around .
B: hmm
F: And a I a a good design would would allow that to happen .
B: a lot of ,
B: yeah
D: Mmm .
F: If if you know if if you can't make it happen then you you do your best .
A: Yeah
A: but that doesn't necessarily contradict um an architecture where there really is a pers a def well - defined interface .
F: I totally agree .
A: and and
F: But but what it nee
F: but th what the point is the
F: in that case the dialogue manager is sort of event driven .
F: So the dialogue manager may think it 's in a dialogue state of one sort ,
F: and this one of these planning modules comes along and says " hey , right now we need to ask a question " .
A: Mm - hmm .
F: So that forces the dialogue manager to change state .
A: Yes
F: OK .
F: It could be y
A: Sure ,
A: ye yeah I I think that 's that 's the um concept that people have ,
F: Yeah , yeah it it F: OK .
A: yep .
A: And and the the underlying idea of course is that there is something like kernel modules with kernel functionality that you can plug uh certain applications like tourist information or um the home scenario with uh controlling a VCR and so on .
A: And then extend it to an arbitrary number of applications eventually .
A: So wouldn't
A: That 's an additional reason to have this well - defined interface
F: Oh , yeah , yeah .
A: and keep these things like uh tourist information external .
A: And then call it external services .
B: Hmm .
A: But of course the the more complex B: Yeah , there is another philosophical issue that I think you know you can evade
A: yep .
B: but , at at least it makes sense to me that sooner or later uh a service is gonna come and describe itself to you .
B: and that 's sort of what Srini is working on in in in the DAML uh project where um you you find a GIS about that gives you information on Berkeley ,
A: Yeah .
B: and it 's it 's gonna be there and tell you what it can do and how it wants to do things .
B: and so you can actually interface to such a system without ever having met it before
B: and the function modeler and a self - description of the um external service haggle it out
A: Hmm .
B: and you can use the same language core , understanding core to interface with planner - A , planner - B , planner - C and so forth .
A: Hmm .
D: Mmm .
B: Which is , you know , uh uh utopian B: completely utopian at the moment ,
B: but slowly , you know , getting into the realm of the uh contingent .
A: Hmm .
B: But we are facing of course much more um realistic problems .
B: And language input for example , is of course uh crucial you know also when you do the sort of deep understanding analysis that we envision .
B: um Then of course , the uh um , you know
B: what is it B: poverty of the stimulus ,
B: yet the m uh the less we get of that the better .
B: and um so we we 're thinking , for example how much syntactic analysis actually happens already in the parser .
D: Hmm .
B: and whether one could interface to that potentially
D: Yeah ,
D: are there currently is uh
D: no syntactic analysis
D: but in the next release there will be some .
B: Hmm .
F: How 's it D: unless
D: and it 's
D: um uh
D: you can access this
F: S so uh y we we looked at the e current pattern matching thing .
D: Hmm .
F: And as you say it 's just a surface pattern matcher .
F: Uh , So what are what are the plans roughly ?
D: um it 's to to integrate and syntactic analysis .
D: and um add some more features like segmentation .
D: So then an utter more than one utterance is There um there 's often uh pause between it
D: and a segmentation occurs .
F: So , the um D: um
F: So the idea is to uh have a pa y y a particular D: yeah
F: Do you have a particular parser in mind ?
F: Is it uh partic d
F: I mean have you thought through ?
F: Is it an HPSG parser ?
F: Is it a whatever ?
D: No no it 's uh I think it 's it 's totally complicated for
D: it 's just one one person
F: OK .
D: and so I have to keep the F: Oh , you have to do it .
F: You have to do it ,
F: yeah .
D: Yeah ,
D: ah and so things must be simpler
F: I see ,
F: so
D: but uh , Miel syntactic analysis with um finite state transducers .
F: But the people at D F
F: Yeah .
F: People at DFKI have written a fair number of parsers .
F: Other you know , people over the years . uh have written various parsers at DFKI .
F: None of them are suitable ?