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Details of Grant 

EPSRC Reference: GR/R91632/01
Title: An object-based approach to the implementation of a mixed initiative, cross-domain, spoken dialogue manager
Principal Investigator: O'Neill, Dr I
Other Investigators:
Hanna, Dr P
Researcher Co-Investigators:
Project Partners:
Department: Computer Science
Organisation: Queen's University of Belfast
Scheme: Fast Stream
Starts: 01 January 2003 Ends: 30 June 2004 Value (£): 61,246
EPSRC Research Topic Classifications:
Intelligent & Expert Systems Multimedia
EPSRC Industrial Sector Classifications:
Related Grants:
Panel History:  
Summary on Grant Application Form
The research aims to determine if it is possible to develop a practical spoken dialogue manager by following an object-oriented development process. Object-oriented development promises to create suites of inheriting and collaborating components that reflect intuitively the generic and specialised dialogue tasks that exist in human-human dialogues, thus enhancing extensibility and maintainability. Furthermore, an object-based approach potentially allows the dialogue manager to operate in several different business domains, using the most appropriate management strategy, in a single implementation. The evolving solution will be documented in UML. Development of the dialogue manager will include the following phases. (1.) Analysis of generic and domain-specific behaviour in a variety of business domains. (2.) Design of inheriting and collaborating components that map intuitively to the behaviours identified during analysis. A slot-filling approach will be adopted initially, and incorporation of finite state and agent-based options will be investigated. (3.) Implementation of the DM components in an object-oriented development language (e.g. Java). (4.) Integration of the DM into an architecture that includes other, third-party system components required for an end-to-end solution. The GALAXY hub and components from an existing DARPA Communicator (e.g. the CU Communicator) are likely to provide the test environment. (5.) Assessment of the DM in terms of effective dialogue behaviour in a live system.
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Organisation Website: http://www.qub.ac.uk