Bil-DOS: A Bi-lingual Dialogue Ordering System (for Subway)

TL;DR

Bil-DOS is a bilingual dialogue system supporting Chinese and English for Subway ordering, enabling seamless language switching and improving non-native speakers' ordering experience through specialized modules.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel bilingual dialogue system with language detection, translation, and intent management tailored for Subway ordering scenarios.

Findings

Supports seamless language switching between Chinese and English.

Effectively manages ordering process through specialized dialogue modules.

Enhances user experience for non-native speakers in fast-food ordering.

Abstract

Due to the unfamiliarity to particular words(or proper nouns) for ingredients, non-native English speakers can be extremely confused about the ordering process in restaurants like Subway. Thus, We developed a dialogue system, which supports Chinese(Mandarin)1 and English2 at the same time. In other words, users can switch arbitrarily between Chinese(Mandarin) and English as the conversation is being conducted. This system is specifically designed for Subway ordering3. In BilDOS, we designed a Discriminator module to tell the language is being used in inputted user utterance, a Translator module to translate used language into English if it is not English, and a Dialogue Manager module to detect the intention within inputted user utterances, handle outlier inputs by throwing clarification requests, map detected Intention and detailed Keyword4 into a particular intention class, locate the current ordering process, continue to give queries to finish the order, conclude the order details once the order is completed, activate the evaluation process when the conversation is done.