XML-Based Dialogue Descriptions in the GEMINI Project

GEMINI (Generic Environment for Multilingual Interactive Natural Interfaces) is an EC funded research project. The goal of GEMINI is to provide a flexible platform for the generation of dialogue applications, able to produce multi-modal and multilingual dialogue interfaces to databases with a minimum of human effort. This platform consists of a toolset supporting all steps of application generation by producing a set of model files each describing a different aspect of the dialogue application. These models are expressed in our newly designed XML-based description language called GDialogXML (Gemini Dialog XML). It is an abstract and object-oriented dialogue description language which is flexible enough to account for modality independent and modality specific features of the final representation languages, which are VoiceXML for the speech modality and xHTML for the web modality. In this paper we introduce the research project GEMINI and present the dialogue modelling language GDialogXML. Furthermore we discuss the limitations of VoiceXML, which we found out while developing an automatic VoiceXML generator using GDialogXML scripts as input.