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Dialog Management

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The Conversational Interface

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Abstract

One of the core aspects in the development of conversational interfaces is to design the dialog management strategy. The dialog management strategy defines the system’s conversational behaviors in response to user utterances and environmental states. The design of this strategy is usually carried out in industry by handcrafting dialog strategies that are tightly coupled to the application domain in order to optimize the behavior of the conversational interface in that context. More recently, the research community has proposed ways of automating the design of dialog strategies by using statistical models trained with real conversations. This chapter describes the main challenges and tasks in dialog management. We also analyze the main approaches that have been proposed for developing dialog managers and the most important methodologies and standards that can be used for the practical implementation of this important component of a conversational interface.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computing and Mathematics, Ulster University, Northern Ireland, UK

    Michael McTear

  2. ETSI Informática y Telecomunicación, University of Granada, Granada, Spain

    Zoraida Callejas

  3. Department of Computer Science, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Madrid, Spain

    David Griol

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  1. Michael McTear
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  2. Zoraida Callejas
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  3. David Griol
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Correspondence to Michael McTear .

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McTear, M., Callejas, Z., Griol, D. (2016). Dialog Management. In: The Conversational Interface. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32967-3_10

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