Widening the Dialogue Workflow Modeling Bottleneck in Ontology-Based Personal Assistants

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel dialogue workflow graph language for Virtual Personal Assistants that simplifies modeling, reduces effort, and accelerates development compared to traditional ontology-based methods.

Contribution

The paper presents a new dialogue specification language and modeling framework that enhances user participation, model compactness, and development speed for VPAs.

Findings

Models are significantly more compact.

Development time for VPAs is reduced.

Concrete LOE reductions demonstrated in projects.

Abstract

We present a new approach to dialogue specification for Virtual Personal Assistants (VPAs) based on so-called dialogue workflow graphs, with several demonstrated advantages over current ontology-based methods. Our new dialogue specification language (DSL) enables customers to more easily participate in the VPA modeling process due to a user-friendly modeling framework. Resulting models are also significantly more compact. VPAs can be developed much more rapidly. 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.