Authoring Tool for Semi-automatic Generation of Task-Oriented Dialogue Scenarios

The lack of suitable conversation opportunities is often pointed out as a major factor inhibiting second language learners' willingness to communicate in the target language. Although computer-based conversational environments have been advocated as a promising approach to mitigate this issue, high authoring costs still prevent their widespread adoption. In this paper, we present a dialogue scenario authoring system that could facilitate the rapid implementation of desirable situational dialogue scenarios, thereby lowering the dialogue scenario authoring barrier for non-programmers or even educators. To this extent, we exploit the common underlying structure of services (restaurant, hotel, travel-planning, etc.) that seem to share a certain degree of similarity at the task slevel and built a versatile dialogue scenario authoring interface that enables semi-automatic generation of services-related dialogue scenarios. Here, we describe the features of the proposed system, and present the results of a pilot evaluation study that hint on the meaningfulness of our approach towards facilitating dialogue scenarios authoring by people who do not have any previous experience designing dialogue systems components.