Language analysis for dialogue management in a theatre information and booking system

SCHISMA is a joint research project of KPN (Royal PTT Nederland) and the University of Twente. The project aims at providing a natural language dialogue system which interfaces a database containing information about theatre performances in a certain city or region. The interface should make it possible to ask about performances in general, to tune in to a specific performance and, if desired, make a reservation for this performance. Research until now has concentrated on various aspects of realising such a theatre information and booking system. Among these aspects are the building of a Wizard of Oz environment for the acquisition of a corpus of dialogues for this domain, analysis and tagging of the dialogue corpus, recognition of domain-specific concepts (actors, authors, plays, dates, etc.), syntactic analysis and dialogue modelling. The emphasis in this paper will be on the analysis of individual utterances at various levels. Most important for the project are short and medium term goals of delivering prototype systems that allow demonstration of the system and evaluation of the design choices. Due to these goals the project does not strive at incorporating advanced but isolated research results on discourse models and syntactic and semantic analysis. Rather we investigate how to identify user preferences and how to embed systems like these in a more comprehensive environment of information and transaction services.