HIS-OwlSpeak: A Model-Driven Dialogue Manager with Multiple Control Modes

In this paper, we present HIS-OwlSpeak, a model-driven dialogue manager for Intelligent Environments. It aims at providing a unified platform offering different modes of dialogue control, i.e., rule-based and probabilistic. For this, the Hidden Information State (HIS) approach is applied to an already published, solely rule-based version of OwlSpeak, which uses ontologies to specify the dialogue and separates the specification from the dialogue control. Consequently, the changes to OwlSpeak necessary for applying the HIS approach are presented in detail. Furthermore, a system test has been performed for a simple dialogue in the flight booking domain successfully validating the implementation.