Presentation

Dialogue systems are computer programs designed to enable a kind of communication with users which is intended to be as similar as possible to that between humans.

Nowadays a number of companies employ these systems to automatically provide information to their customers, for example, using speech on the telephone or text-based interaction through the Internet.

The main goal of the Spanish Thematic Network on Advanced Dialogue Systems (RTSDA) is to stablish a multidisciplinary collaboration between Spanish academic research teams and companies that set up these systems for commercial use.

By means of this cooperation the Network aims at improving state-of-the-art of the this technology paying special attention to the most characteristic module of these systems, which is known as dialogue manager.

The goal of this module is to enable intelligent and natural system behaviour in the interaction with the users, thus easing the acceptance of this technology by the society.

To achieve this goal it is critical that, in addition to other issues, the dialogue manager provides robustness against errors typically made by other system modules.

The Network has been funded by the Spanish Ministry for Science and Innovation under Special Action TIN2011-13729-E. Head researcher: Ramon Lopez-Cozar Delgado (University of Granada, Spain)