Research On Dialogue Process Modeling Method

With the rapid development of mobile internet technologies and mobile devices, dialogue systems are undergoing dramastic progress. Dialogue systems are used in applications such as education, e-business, and medical care and other industries, and have achieved good effects. But Man-machine dialogue is a very complex process, so the design and development of a dialogue system is a very labor-intensive and time-consuming work. In order to reduce the workload and cost, a general modeling technique is desired. To achieve such a modeling technique, domain- or business-related aspects of a dialogue process model must be neglected or seperated from the concrete implementation and knowledge base to form a general dialogue system development mode. In this thesis,Through a thorough comprehensive survey of existing dialogue processes in many applications, the thesis gives a general characterization of dialogue process, and presents a a domain-independent visual dialogue process modeling language (or VDPML). VDPML provides a common dialogue process modeling method and introduces a monitoring mechanism which is independent of the dialogue process, and supports modular modeling and model reuse.The main contributions of this thesis is as follows.1. Giving a characterization of dialogue process and a dialogue modeling method.By analyzing the many existing dialogue processes, this thesis has extracted a variety of basic operations which is involved in dialogue processes and characterized dialogue processes, and outlined a dialogue process modeling method.2.Proposing a visual dialogue process modeling language.This paper presents a model language, called VDPML. Nodes represent actions or functions in VDPML, and edges represent links between nodes. In order to improve the expressivity of VDPML, atomic nodes and their attributes are used to represent process actions, and atomic nodes can be composed into composite nodes when necessary. This makes VDPML support flexibility and reusability.3. Using a dynamic description logic to model dialogue processes.A dynamic description logic (DDL) is used to formalize VDPML dialogue processes。4.Providing heuristics to debug dialogue processes.A few heurisitc rules and techniques are summarized to debug possible problems in dialogue processes.5. Designing a domian-independent mode of dialogue system development.The mode can separate process developers and domain experts. Developers focus on providing a common platform for conversation system development and conversation management, and domain experts just focus on modeling conversation progresses which is domain- or business-related, and providing the domain knowledge base according to the dialogue process modeling language which has been defined.