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<Paper uid="W97-0617">
  <Title>Towards a PURE Spoken Dialogue System for Information Access</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="90" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> With the rapid rate at which the availability of information is increasing, it is important to make access to this information easier. One may wish to get the arrival/departure information for a given flight, verify if a particular book is available at a library, find the stock price for any fund, access yellow page information on-line, check/maintain voice mail remotely, get schedules for entertainment events, perform remote banking transactions, get used car prices, and the list goes on and on. Such tasks can be classifted as information access (IA) tasks, where the primary objective is to get some piece of information from a certain place by providing constraints for the search. Some of these tasks may also involve an &amp;quot;action&amp;quot; that may change the state of the underlying database, e.g., making a reservation for an event, making transactions on an account, etc. It would be very helpful to develop Spoken Dialogue (SD) interfaces for such IA applications, and several such attempts are already being made (Seneff et al., 1996; Sadek et al., 1996; Abella et al., 1996; Fraser and Dalsgaard, 1996; Lamel et al., 1996; Kellner et al., 1996; Niedermair, 1996; Barnett and Singh, 1996; Gorin et ell., 1996).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> In this paper, we differentiate between such IA tasks and the more complicated problem solving tasks where multiple sub-problems are concurrently active, each with different constraints on them and the final solution consists of identifying and meeting the user's goals while satisfying these multiple constraints. Examples of such applications include a system that offers investment advice to a user based on personal preferences and the existing market conditions, or an ATIS-like application that assists the user in travel planning including flight reservations, car rental, hotel accommodations, etc.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> In addition to the general requirement .of accuracy, there are four other important design objectives for  SD systems: * Portability of an SD system refers to the ability of the system to be moved from one application/domain to another.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> * Usability of an SD system refers to the ease with which a user can use the system and the naturalness that it provides.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> * Robustness of an SD system refers to the abil null ity of the system to help the user acquire the desired information even in the presence of user and system errors.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> * Extensibility of an SD system implies that additional queries within a given application can be added to the system without much trouble.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6">  The purpose of this paper is to describe an SD system, in particular the dialogue manager, that is being developed with these objectives in mind. Since these design objectives are often conflicting in nature, one has to strike a balance between them. In a manner of speaking, one could say that the objective is to create a PURE (Portable, Usable, Robust, Extensible) system. It is our belief that it is possible to develop an &amp;quot;almost&amp;quot; PURE system for IA tasks.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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