The Structure and Management of Tasks in a Dialogue System for Accessing Web Services

Dialog systems can be seen as user interfaces to access other applications. They have to address the user needs, as well as the requirements of the applications. This work is concerned with the representation and the management of the application tasks. We have studied two types of web services: form-filling and information-seeking. We claim that dialogue systems may not intend to use the same strategies for all types of applications. Form-filling applications do not need assistants, but explanations about the meaning of the fields. Information-seeking engines need complex strategies to access and display results, and hence assistants may guide the user to give the query constraints. In our proposal, the task models we describe are used to determine how to acquire more reliable constraints from the user and how to adapt them in order to obtain more suitable results; as well as the most appropriate presentation of results.