Middleware for Incremental Processing in Conversational Agents

Schlangen D, Baumann T, Buschmeier H, Kopp S, Skantze G, Yaghoubzadeh R. Middleware for Incremental Processing in Conversational Agents. In: Proceedings of SIGDIAL 2010: the 11th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group in Discourse and Dialogue. Association for Computational Linguistics; 2010: 51-54.We describe work done at three sites on designing conversational agents capable of incremental processing. We focus on the ‘middleware’ layer in these systems, which takes care of passing around and maintaining incremental information between the modules of such agents. All implementations are based on the abstract model of incremental dialogue processing proposed by Schlangen and Skantze (2009), and the paper shows what different instantiations of the model can look like given specific requirements and application areas