ClippyScript: A Programming Language for Multi-Domain Dialogue Systems

摘要

The past year has witnessed the revival of spoken dialogue systems. As these systems become multi-domain and more ubiquitous, the efficient scripting of dialogues increases in impor-tantance. As of today, statistical approaches to dialogue control are not yet feasible; the problem remains quite firmly one of manual coding. This paper describes an object-oriented programming language that we have christened ClippyScript, which is aimed at the rapid manual scripting of multi-domain dialogue systems. Only four main keywords-MODULE, SLOTS, GRAMMAR, and ACTIONS-plus a concept of focus provide the necessary abstractions for language understanding, dynamic grammars, hierarchical slot filling, multiple domains, access to data services, and performing of the dialogue goal. The language's expressive power is further boosted by the ability of embedding code snippets in a high-level programming language (C#).