WebTalk: mining Websites for automatically building dialog systems

The task of creating customized spoken dialog applications has traditionally been known to be expensive, requiring significant resources and a certain level of expertise. This is clearly an obstacle in porting and scaling dialog systems especially those required for customer care and help desk applications. This paper describes WebTalk - a technique for automatically creating spoken and text-based customer-care dialog applications solely based on a company's Website. Our goal is to create task oriented dialog services by automatically learning the task knowledge and mining information present on corporate Websites. In this paper, we discuss the motivation and the feasibility of creating such a technique and present an overview of the main components of WebTalk. We address some of the challenges and present methods for evaluating such a system.