An Ontology-Based Dialogue Management Framework for Virtual Personal Assistants in Common Lisp

Abstract

We present a new approach to dialogue specification for Virtual Personal Assistants (VPAs) based on so-called dialogue workflow graphs. Our approach relies on Semantic Web technology (OWL), implemented in Common Lisp with the help of the Racer reasoner. Our new dialogue specification language (DSL) is a set of Common Lisp macros, a Domain Specific Language, which facilitates customer participation in the modeling process. The resulting dialogue models are also very concise. The DSL is a new modeling layer on top of our ontology-based Dialogue Management (DM) framework OntoVPA. We explain the rationale and benefits behind the new language, and support our claims with concrete reduced Level-of-Effort (LOE) numbers from two recent OntoVPA projects.

Keywords: Personal assistants, ontology-based dialogue management, dialogue modeling, ontology-based rules, Semantic Web