Widening the Dialogue Workflow Modeling Bottleneck in Ontology-Based Personal Assistants
This work addresses the modeling bottleneck for developers and customers of ontology-based personal assistants, representing an incremental improvement over existing methods.
The paper tackles the difficulty of dialogue specification in Virtual Personal Assistants by introducing a new dialogue specification language (DSL) that enables easier customer participation and more compact models, resulting in significantly reduced development effort with concrete Level-of-Effort (LOE) numbers from two projects.
We present a new approach to dialogue specification for Virtual Personal Assistants (VPAs) based on so-called dialogue workflow graphs, with several demonstrated advantages over current ontology-based methods. Our new dialogue specification language (DSL) enables customers to more easily participate in the VPA modeling process due to a user-friendly modeling framework. Resulting models are also significantly more compact. VPAs can be developed much more rapidly. The DSL is a new modeling layer on top of our ontology-based Dialogue Management (DM) framework OntoVPA. We explain the rationale and benefits behind the new language and support our claims with concrete reduced Level-of-Effort (LOE) numbers from two recent OntoVPA projects.